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Reading 

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Great W\R 




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THE 

READING MILITIA IN THE 

GREAT WAR 



jf BENNETT NOLAN, Esq. 

of the Berks County Bar 



Published under the auspices of the 
Historical Society of Berks County 



PRINTED BY F. A. WOERNER. 32 N. SIXTH ST. 
READING, PA. 



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CONTENTS 



Part I ' 

Chaptbb Page 

Foreword 3 

I. Departure and Embarkation 13 

II. The Baccarat Sector 31 

III. The Champagne Front 53 

IV. The St. Mihiel Drive 81 

V. The Argonne-Meuse Campaign 91 

VI. The Army of Occupation 102 

Part II 

I. The Training Camp 113 

II. The Fismes Sector 136 

III. The Argonne 153 

IV. The Projected Attack on Metz 169 

Conclusion 179 

Company "I"— Dead 181 

Company "A" — Dead 182 

Company "I"— Wounded 183 

Company "A"— Wounded 184 

Company "I" Roster 187 

Company "A" Roster 201 



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T 



<>o Foreword 

X 

^ r ■ ^ HE transmission to posterity of the record 

of honorable achievement at a time of 
great crisis is a task which should com- 
mend itself to every citizen. The great war 
brought to us, as to all men, privation and woe. 
It left a path of blasted hopes, of young man- 
hood maimed or sacrificed in a glorious cause. 
But it was not without its compensations. It 
showed us that the old time zeal of this martial 
county could, on the occasion, again burn high. 
It evoked in us qualities to which we had long 
been strangers. Our people displayed a spirit 
of unselfish sacrifice, a self abnegation, a de- 
voted, united and tireless activity for the com- 
mon weal which surprised ourselves and earned 
the admiration of our neighbors. 

High traditions count for much whether in 
families or in bodies politic. The proud mili- 
tary record of fifteen centuries steeled the arm 
of a sensitive, high strung people, called upon 
to defend Verdun. And doubtless the Berks 
boys who fought in France in the trying summer 
of 1918 were conscious that they were main- 
taining the high standard set by their forefathers 
in the Revolution, in 1812, at Chapultepec and 
on the Rapidan. 



4 THE READING MILITIA 

It is both interesting and instructive in re- 
viewing the history of our county in former 
wars to see how, at each new trial, the sterling 
worth of our citizenry has risen to meet the 
occasion. Then, as now, men of all ranks 
hastened to enroll with the colors. Those who 
felt themselves competent sought and won com- 
missions; the elderly, and the women busied 
themselves in welfare work. To the men who 
successfully led the yeomanry of Berks in former 
wars, to the Hunters, the Muhlenbergs, the 
McKnights and the Greggs of other days, has 
succeeded a new generation of gallant officers. 
Their task led them far over seas under strange 
skies, amidst new conditions of warfare. But 
who shall say that they did not worthily uphold 
the great traditions to which they were born 
heir? 

The war activities of Berks County were far- 
flung and manifold. Each deserves to be per- 
petuated, so far as is humanly possible, through 
the medium of history. But amongst all the 
Berks units which labored at home and abroad 
the record of the local Militia Companies is the 
most salient and appealing. Their members 
fought no more intensively than thousands of 
other Berks lads who accepted the great call. 



FOREWORD 5 

These, however, went and returned singly or 
in small groups. The Militia Companies were 
the only pecularily Berks County units which 
fought cohesively and continuously from the 
beginning of the American Intervention to 
Armistice Day. They marched out together 
through lanes of heart-sick, apprehensive towns- 
men, and they returned together, though with 
depleted ranks, to receive the deserved plaudits 
of those same townsmen. 

The military system in Berks County has had 
a long, a checkered, and on the whole, an hon- 
orable career. Our local levies were formed 
along the careless, hap-hazard lines which char- 
acterized our National Defense from Colonial 
days. On paper, Washington was head of a for- 
midable force, supposedly four hundred thou- 
sand men. Actually he never had more than 
twenty thousand available for command. Five 
Militia Companies from Berks were organized 
during the Revolutionary War, the first hav- 
ing been commanded by Captain Joseph Hiester. 
The Company commanded by Peter Nagle re- 
ported to General Washington at Cambridge as 
early as August 18th, 1775. The men fought 
well at the battle of Long Island and in the 
Yorktown Campaign. Discipline, however, does 
not seem to have been strict and the term of 



6 THE READING MILITIA 

service was uncertain. As late as 1840 nine of 
these Revolutionary militia veterans were still 
living in Reading. 

Passing the abortive Whiskey Insurrection of 
1794, to the suppression of which Berks County 
supplied some levies, the next appearance of 
the local militia was in the War of 1812. The 
natural aptitude and bravery of the men were 
sacrificed to indecision and incapacity amongst 
the leaders. Vaunting patriotism seldom dwells 
on the cowardly surrender of Detroit and the 
burning of the National Capitol by a vastly in- 
ferior force, opposed by a militia four times its 
number, fighting under the eyes of the President. 
As many as ten companies were raised in Berks 
County during the war. One of them, the Wash- 
ington Guards, was commanded by George De 
Benneville Keim. These companies appear 
never to have gotten far from home, and the 
part which they took in the actual fighting was 
insignificant. 

Then ensued in our County annals, a period 
of military inaction. The piping hours of peace 
were punctuated only by Fourth of July Reviews 
and by Battalion days. The most notable of 
the Battalions was that of 1842 which was re- 
viewed by General Winfield Scott, who came to 



FOREWORD 7 

Reading expressly for the purpose. The gen- 
eration of soldiers which has returned from 
France to a land strangely changed and Puritan- 
ized may find it interesting to contrast their re- 
ception with that of the military heroes of 1842. 
The Berks and Schuylkill Journal of May 20th, 
of that year, in discussing the above affairs said: 

"This glorious assemblage of heroes made 
their annual appearance yesterday at Read- 
ing. There was lots of fun, beauty and 
broomsticks, rum, flying-horses, fights with 
the guards, fancy military movements, fisti- 
cuffs, dances, dice and pitching pennies, and 
all the elegant amusements peculiar to the 
bill. The words of command were given 
with remarkable emphasis and cadence. 
The movements of the troops were, we are 
compelled to say, not quite so elaborate as 
we had anticipated from the known abilities 
of the commanders." 

The part taken by Berks County Militia in 
the Mexican War was particularly active and 
heroic. The Reading Artillerists who had had 
a continuous career since 1794, departed for 
Pittsburg in 1846 under the captaincy of 
Thomas S. Leoser. They were engaged in heady 
and continuous fighting, terminating in the as- 
sault upon Chapultepec, at which Lieutenant 
Richards McMichael was cited for bravery. 



8 THE READING MILITIA 

The great Civil Conflict gave to our local 
militia the opportunity to write its name large 
on the pages of history. It was Berks County 
which furnished the first defenders. In a 
harassing crisis, Captain James McKnight and 
the Ringgold Light Artillery, were the first to 
respond to their country's call. The laconic 
telegram of the Secretary of War on April 16th, 
1861 : "Push forward your company by the first 
train," is at once an ample excuse and a fitting 
dedication for the thousands of brave Berks 
Militia men who served their country so well 
in the last one hundred and forty years. Eight 
companies, formed in various parts of the 
county, came crowding on the heels of the gal- 
lant Ringgolds. Their exploits are too well 
known to require further commentary here. 

It was towards the close of the war, in 1864, 
that the present loosely constructed body, 
known as Pennsylvania State National Guard, 
came into existence. Of the two militia com- 
panies, whose career it is proposed to detail 
in the pages which shall follow, Company 
A has had the longest existence. It succeeded 
the venerable Reading Artillerists and was mus- 
tered into service in 1881 as Company G, Fourth 
Regiment, National Guard of Pennsylvania. The 



FOREWORD 9 

first captain was Robert H. Savage. The com- 
pany numbered fifty-six men. 

Company I came into existence during the 
stress of the Spanish-American War on June 
8th, 1898. The first captain was Harry M. 
Phillippi. Both companies served creditably 
through the war. Company A took part in the 
expedition to Porto Rico and received its bap- 
tism of fire at the battle of Cahey Pass. Captain 
Samuel Willits, who commanded the company 
on this expedition, afterward entered the regu- 
lar service and died far from his native county, 
amidst the rice fields of Mindanao. 

Another period of comparative inaction, 
broken only by patrol duty during the coal strike 
of 1902, was terminated by the disturbance on 
the Mexican border in the spring of 1916. Both 
of the local companies were mobilized for serv- 
ice on June 22 d, 1916, and departed for the 
border. They were formally mustered into the 
federal service and became a part of the regular 
United States Army on July 8th, 1916. 



PART I 



THE CAREER OF COMPANY I 




Later known as 

Company D 



150th Machine Gun Battalion 

Forty-second Division 
American Expeditionary Force 



CHAPTER I 

Departure and Embarkation 

COMPANY I, at the time it was called into 
service in the war against the Germans, 
numbered one hundred and eighty-five 
men and six officers. Of the Berks boys, one 
hundred and three were from the City of Read- 
ing and nineteen from the County. A squad 
of twelve privates from the Tenth Pennsylvania 
Infantry was assigned to the Company. The 
average age of the Company was twenty-one 
years. All wars have required the services of 
youthful soldiers. As this war surpassed all 
others in stress and fiery acuteness, it peculiarly 
required the services of young athletic men. It 
was no raw, untrained body that assembled that 
hot Sunday morning at the Armory in Reading. 
The months of service on the Mexican border 
had trained the men, and given them the poise 
and self-reliance of the trained soldier. The 
intelligence of the officers, commissioned and 
uncommissioned, had been sharpened by the 
practice of actual warfare, albeit of the guerilla 
variety. 

The call for mobilization came at nine o'clock 
on the morning of July 15th, 1917. The citizens 



14 THE READING MILITIA 

who saw the khaki-clad forms making their way 
to the Armory on Walnut street had a vague feel- 
ing that the war had come home to us at last. 
An irksome period of forty days ensued, devoted 
to drills, practice hikes and perfection in the 
training of a soldier. Those of us who met the 
company in line of march on the roads near 
Reading were impressed with the earnestness 
with which all maneuvers were continued. The 
hour of the great adventure was near at hand 
and the boys were ready to confront it fearlessly 
and steadfastly. 

On the 18th of August, an order was received 
transferring Captain Charles G. Miller, who had 
led the Company throughout its Border Cam- 
paign, to Company A, and transferring Captain 
Edward V. Kestner, of Company A, to Company 
I. The two lieutenants were also transferred to 
other companies and their place taken by Lieu- 
tenant Victor Garman of Company H, Fourth 
Pennsylvania Infantry, and Lieutenant David N. 
Trapnell of Company K, Fourth Pennsylvania 
Infantry. Second Lieutenant Glenn H. Ross of 
the Sixteenth Infantry and Second Lieutenant 
J. B. McCall of Company B, Tenth Regiment, 
were also assigned to the Company. First Lieu- 
tenant Fred Arsenau, from Wisconsin, joined the 



DEPARTURE AND EMBARKATION 15 

detachment at Camp Mills. The Company itself 
was formally transferred to the One Hundred 
and Forty-ninth Divisional Machine Gun Bat- 
talion. It was realized that these changes meant 
that the men would probably train abroad and 
that the day of embarkation must be near. On 
August 23d, it was announced that they would 
move to Camp Mills on Long Island. 

At three o'clock on August 25th, the Company 
moved out of its Armory and entrained for 
Camp Mills. The fact that it had been chosen 
for a machine gun detachment and that it had 
been selected for early departure overseas, made 
the leave-taking a particularly impressive one. 
The departing Company was escorted to the sta- 
tion by various civic detachments, but without 
music, and in a manner befitting the solemnity 
of the moment. 

It was realized by all that from this body 
would probably come the first sacrifices which 
Berks County was to offer in a great cause. Men 
who later served abroad and grew callous to the 
stress of actual conflict have been heard to say 
that their most lasting impression in the Great 
War was the sight of that column of white-faced 
boys marching out to the great empty station, 
ascending the hill down which so many of them 
were never to return. 



16 THE READING MILITIA 

The stress of the all-night journey bore hardly 
on the boys who were naturally under the strain 
of leave-taking, coupled with that of uncer- 
tainty. All of the Company were glad when the 
signal to detrain was given at eight o'clock in 
the morning of August 26th, at the Long Island 
rendezvous. 

About two miles from the beautiful estates of 
Garden City there has arisen, in the last three 
years, a collection of ugly wooden barracks, 
stores and dining halls, reached by muddy com- 
pany streets and dominated by a huge water 
tower. This is Camp Mills, famous as the 
pre-embarkation point of so many units of the 
American Expeditionary Force. Company I 
pitched its tents and made itself as comfortable 
as possible for what was to be a seven weeks' 
sojourn. The irksome hours of camp life were 
employed in bettering the men in their soldierly 
exercises. They seldom left camp except for 
stereotyped hikes on the flat Long Island roads. 
Weariness bore hard on the boys. It was very 
difficult to keep them within the bounds of dis- 
cipline. It was no wonder that the A. W. 0. L. 
(absent without leave) increased steadily. Some 
of the truants even found their way as far as 
Reading and had to be brought back through 
the ministrations of the Provost Guard. 



DEPARTURE AND EMBARKATION 17 

It was at Camp Mills that the boys had their 
first experiences with the great welfare bodies, 
which were to contribute so much to the comfort 
of their life overseas. The American civil 
populace was aroused to an unprecedented pitch 
of activity. Not only did the great organized 
bodies, such as the Red Cross, the Y. M. C. A. 
and the Knights of Columbus, cater to their 
comforts, but the families in the neighboring 
towns took turns in entertaining the boys at 
their homes and in endeavoring to alleviate the 
inevitable homesickness. 

No place is so prolific of rumors as an army 
camp. The date of sailing was announced at 
least twenty times before it actually came. At 
last, on October 18th, the welcome order to 
entrain was given and the Company left Garden 
City for Hoboken, where they embarked at half 
past six of a crisp fall evening upon the trans- 
port "President Grant." 

The "President Grant" was a converted Ger- 
man liner, which formerly plied between Boston 
and Hamburg. It was a comfortable ship 
enough but very much overcrowded. Indeed, 
this was the condition that obtained on all trans- 
ports which left American shores at that time. 
She carried on this particular voyage sixty-five 



18 THE READING MILITIA 

hundred soldiers and a crew of fifteen hundred 
men. 

To the millions of American youths who made 
the fateful crossing in 1917 and 1918, the trans- 
Atlantic passage is scarcely a pleasant memory. 
To those, who, like the writer, have made the 
trip under the stress of war conditions and in 
an overcrowded transport, it evokes memories of 
the horrors of the middle passage in the slave 
ships of other days. The horrible sickening 
odor that met one upon descending into the 
fetid, poorly lighted hold, will never be forgot- 
ten. Conditions on the "President Grant" were 
probably better than the average and yet they 
were bad enough. The men were fed twice a 
day, at eight in the morning and at two in the 
afternoon. The food appears to have been 
deficient both in quantity and in quality. The 
sanitary conditions were indescribably bad. Dis- 
cipline in the use of the latrines seems to have 
been wanting. Stout Sergeant Smith, whose 
diary we shall often have occasion to quote in the 
pages which shall follow, remarks naively, "It 
seems more like a lunatic asylum than a trans- 
port carrying United States troops." 

Nor was the voyage to be an uneventful one. 
On the third day came a call for volunteers to 



DEPARTURE AND EMBARKATION 19 

work as stokers and firemen. To the credit of 
the Reading Company, be it recorded that four- 
teen of the boys, in all their misery and nausea, 
volunteered for this gruelling task. The ship 
lagged, however, and it soon became apparent 
that something was wrong. The voyage was 
finally abandoned on the evening of the third 
day. 

"It was sure a disappointed bunch," says 
Sergeant Smith, "that watched the re- 
mainder of the fleet, which consisted of 
seven transports and their convoy, grad- 
ually disappear into the still night and we 
returned a failure." 

After a rough tempestuous home voyage the 
boat load of heart-sick boys passed once more 
under the Statue of Liberty and docked at Ho- 
boken on October 28th. Company A, as the 
Reading contingent was now designated, were as- 
signed to quarters at Fort Totten on Long Island. 

Now ensued a trying three weeks for the dis- 
appointed soldiers. Such letters, written during 
this period, as the writer has been able to peruse, 
testify to the low state to which their morale 
had fallen. One of them frankly writes, "Want 
of money is the only reason that we are still 
here." The weather was indescribably rainy 



20 THE READING MILITIA 

and bad, and the men were assigned nine tents 
for the entire Company. Finally at three 
o'clock of a bitterly cold morning, on November 
14th, 1918, the Company once more embarked 
on the British transport "Cedric." 

Conditions were infinitely better on the 
"Cedric" than they had been on the "President 
Grant." The men had the privilege of the deck 
and enjoyed a pleasant run to Halifax, which 
they left on November 19th. 

The second convoy was composed of four 
ships with a protecting flotilla of torpedo boats. 
The voyage was uneventful until November 
28th, when the bare rainy headlands of the Irish 
coast were descried dead ahead. Here there 
was plenty of excitement as a submarine en- 
deavored to attack the convoy. The ships im- 
mediately scattered as per preconcerted arrange- 
ment and the "Cedric" raced under forced draft 
into Belfast Harbor. They left there at one 
o'clock of the next day and reached Liverpool 
on the morning of December 1st. Two days' 
rations were issued to the men, who disembarked 
at eight o'clock. It was a solemn moment when 
the company first set foot on foreign soil. Each 
soldier had a feeling that the grim adventure 
had commenced in earnest. 



DEPARTURE AND EMBARKATION 21 

Anyone who passed a trainload of American 
troops in England or France will remember the 
experience with interest. The men were crowded 
sixteen to a compartment in third-class carriages. 
They must sit upright as there was no room to 
lie down. The windows were open, to be sure, 
and these were always lined with the heads of 
excited doughboys singing, gesticulating and 
shouting, "We are on our way" or "Where do 
we go from here?" The equipment was carried 
in box cars behind. The officers rode in coaches 
ahead and were but little better off than the 
men. When the weather was fine, a two or 
three day trip was barely tolerable, but in ex- 
treme cold or extreme heat, the privations were 
severe. There were no toilets in the troop car- 
riages and the men must watch their opportunity 
as best they might when the train stopped. 

The Reading boys entrained almost imme- 
diately for the great camp at Winchester in 
Hampshire. At Paddington there was a stop 
and many a grateful letter brought its testi- 
monial to Reading mothers of the coffee and 
food served by the English Red Cross women. 
Winchester was reached at ten o'clock in the 
evening. The city, in common with all the South 
English towns, was kept in complete darkness 
because of the air raids. The men stumbled 



22 THE READING MILITIA 

about in the darkness, loaded their baggage as 
best they could and marched through the dark 
narrow streets to their destination. This proved 
to be an English rest camp, where they were 
quartered in wooden barracks, thirty men to a 
hut. Each hut was equipped with a stove, but 
as there was no fuel it was an asset of doubtful 
value. There was no bed available and one of 
the Corporals plaintively remarked, "We damn 
near froze." Their stay at Winchester was un- 
eventful except for hikes on the chalk downs 
and sightseeing tours of the noble cathedral. 

On December 11th, the Company aroused 
in the darkness, at four o'clock, and entrained 
for the great embarkation port of Southhamp- 
ton. They embarked from the same wharf 
which had been used by the gallant First Ex- 
peditionary Force in the fateful days of August, 
1914. Their ship was the "Prince George" and 
was American-owned before the war. 

Slipping down the Solent, they passed the his- 
toric Isle of Wight. No navigation lights were 
shown and the location of Southhampton was 
only to be detected by the rays of the giant 
search lights continually circling in the heavens 
for raiding Zeppelins. Further up, between 
Dover and Calais, the strait was guarded by a 



DEPARTURE AND EMBARKATION 23 

chain of torpedo boat destroyers. In the broad 
channel, however, where the Reading boys 
crossed, there was no protection save the dark- 
ness and the convoy. 

They arrived at Havre and first set foot on 
French soil on the morning of December 12th. 
The lads were marched out two miles to an 
English camp where for the first time since their 
introduction into the services, they were given 
the privileges of the wet canteen, English ale 
and French wines. Small wonder that after the 
perils and privations of the voyage some of the 
boys succumbed to this unwonted temptation. 

On December 13th, at 3:30 in the morning, 
the Company entrained for their first journey 
upon French soil. It was bitterly cold and all 
the windows in the cars were broken. Reading 
ingenuity, however, devised a covering with bur- 
lap and tacks. The journey was interesting 
enough and the boys amused themselves by 
calling in Pennsylvania Dutch to the German 
prisoners whom they passed, working upon the 
roadbed. When noon came, however, and they 
had eaten nothing since four o'clock of the pre- 
ceding afternoon, the troops became impatient 
and somewhat faint. At last, at 12:30, after- 
noon, they stopped on a siding and rations of 



24 THE READING MILITIA 

corn, tomatoes, jam and "hard-tack" were served 
to them. 

In their two days' journey they had crossed 
the breadth of France and reached the historic 
province of Lorraine, the field of so many wars 
of other times and whose soil was once more to 
be drenched, and with American blood. In 
their migration they passed the little city of 
Chaumont, ancient capital of this martial 
province. Had they noted, they might have 
seen, not far from the track, the gray walls of 
an old French cavalry barracks. In the court- 
yard waved an American flag and all the win- 
dows glowed ruddily in the twilight of that brief 
December day. It was a veritable hive of in- 
dustry, for this was the general headquarters of 
the American armies, the celebrated and mys- 
terious G. H. Q. of official records. Hard by 
at a stucco villa, the sentry paced before the 
residence of the Commander-in-Chief. 

At six o'clock in the morning of December 
15th the weary boys arrived at La Franche, de- 
trained, and hiked to Liffol-le-Petit, where they 
were billeted in stables and slept on piles of 
straw on the floors. This was the first experi- 
ence of the Reading boys in the French rural 
villages which they were afterwards to know so 



DEPARTURE AND EMBARKATION 25 

well. It is both amusing and interesting, in 
reading the letters written at this time, to note 
the comments of the lads. All of them, of 
course, make comparisons between living con- 
ditions in France and at home. All of them are 
struck by the circumstance that in France, 
house, stable, pig-sty and chicken-house are 
under the same roof and in communication with 
one another. The invariable and unsavory 
manure heap before each door is also noted. 
It was the holiday season and amidst the mud 
and monotony all thoughts were of the folks 
at home and of the Christmas season there. The 
field Y. M. C. A. did its part to make their stay 
tolerable and arranged a Christmas entertain- 
ment to which the Reading boys contributed. 

On the morning of the great holiday, Sergeant 
Smith was aroused by the clanging of church 
bells and stepped out of his cantonment to find 
the ground covered with snow. "Gee, but I 
felt home-sick," is his plaintive note. It was a 
tragic period for the heart-sick boys. 

On the next day the Company arose at five 
o'clock and were aware that some immediate 
change was in prospect. Emergency rations 
were served and they started on what was to be 
a three-day hike through a steady downfall of 



26 THE READING MILITIA 

snow. The hob-nail shoes bore hardly on the 
boys and by noon many of them were incapaci- 
tated. After a fourteen-mile journey through 
the slush they arrived at Millaris. 

Captain Kestner, who had been tireless in his 
labors for the comfort of the men, declares that 
this two-day hike over the heavy Lorraine roads 
was the most trying experience which the Com- 
pany had in France, excepting only the actual 
warfare in the trenches. The real reason for 
the peremptory journey, as the Captain under- 
stands it, was intelligence that the Boche had 
prepared a swift and gigantic stroke from their 
base at Metz. It was deemed advisable to move 
all the untrained troops further back from the 
lines. At 6:30 the next morning, the travel- 
spent boys could scarcely be routed from the 
attics and stables where they had spent the night. 
Their shoes were as stiff and hard as rocks ; their 
feet were in a pitiable condition and nearly all 
of them were suffering from the exposure. They 
left the village at eight o'clock and were soon 
in the midst of a blinding snow storm. Man 
after man dropped by the wayside, but they 
struggled on for fourteen miles and reached the 
village of Thivet in the middle of the afternoon. 
The boys went to their billets and were able to 



DEPARTURE AND EMBARKATION 27 

procure pails of hot water in which to wash their 
feet. The next day the Company completed the 
short lap of six miles to Chanoy, "A dreary and 
desolate burg," as one of the lads describes it, 
where the soldiers were billeted in the inevitable 
stables and spent four dreary days. Hard labor 
was the order of the hour. "It surely is 
amusing," writes Sergeant Smith, "to see officers 
doing an enlisted man's work." 

On the third day of the new year, Captain 
Kestner, Lieutenant Ross, Sergeants Moore, Lud- 
wig and Boyd were sent to the school for ma- 
chine gun training at Gondrecourt. Lieutenant 
Garman was left in charge of the Company. At 
this time, also, they received their first pay in 
foreign money. The boys marveled at the size 
of the one hundred franc notes and compared 
them humorously to wall paper. A debauch of 
chocolate, eggs, apples and all sweet meats pro- 
curable in the village followed. There, too, the 
boys were first given their steel helmets. 

The Company was now put under French in- 
structors and given daily training in the routine 
of machine gun warfare. The weapon, which 
the boys were to use throughout the war, was the 
French Hotchkiss gun, capable of firing three 
hundred and fifty shots to the minute. The 



28 THE READING MILITIA 

officers pronounced the gun an excellent one 
and cite the fact that in all the spirited fighting 
which the Company underwent, the guns never 
once jammed. The boys were in full war regalia 
and were given daily drills in the practice 
trenches which had been dug to accustom them 
to the actual warfare which they were soon to 
encounter. The difficulty in understanding 
their instructors was at first a drawback, but 
the natural aptitude of the American lads, 
coupled with the zeal and good humor of the 
French sous-officers soon overcame this obstacle. 
Apparently our veterans of the Mexican War 
had little to learn from the army who had been 
four years in the trenches of Europe. "Nothing 
gained" is the plaintive observation of one of 
the Corporals. "We had all the dope they gave 
us long ago." 

On January 20th, Sergeant Jarrette and Pri- 
vates Reifsnyder, Kraemer, Burkey and Dough- 
erty were sent to the school at Branchmont for 
a week's advance instructions in machine gun 
tactics. 

On January 27th, at eight in the morning, the 
Company assembled in heavy marching order 
for a long hike to a new location. Their march 
took them through the old Roman town of 



DEPARTURE AND EMBARKATION 29 

Langres. The boys were delighted with the high 
walls and the moats. Some of them were given 
an opportunity to visit the citadel perched on its 
rocky eyrie. From here they could observe the 
snow cloud on the southeast, which marked the 
summit of Mont Blanc. To the northwest, a 
blue haze on the horizon, lay the Alsatian Hills 
in Germany. It was their first glimpse of the 
land against which they had come to fight and 
from which so many of them were never to re- 
turn. 

Tired and spent from their long march under 
the heavy packs, the men arrived at Bourg and 
were again billeted in barns. 

The time until February 8th was taken up 
in severe exercise and drill in the machine gun 
emplacements. 

"No more holidays in the Army," writes 

Sergeant Smith, "Sundays are to be devoted 

to drills in sanitation." 

On February 9th the Company engaged in a 
particularly irksome three-day maneuver. There 
was a lack of mules, so that the boys had to pull 
the carts themselves and were thoroughly worn 
out by the end of the day. On their return 
from the maneuver they were cheered and de- 
lighted by the reappearance of Captain Kestner 



30 THE READING MILITIA 

and his detachment, who returned from the 
school at Gondrecourt. The Captain gave the 
boys their first instructions in the use of the 
English gas masks, which were dealt out to them 
at this time. 

On February 12th, while the Company were 
at practice on the ranges. Private Reynolds was 
accidently struck by the ricochet of a chance 
bullet. He was removed to the Base Hospital 
at Langres and there, next day, he died; the 
first of the Reading boys to make the supreme 
sacrifice in his country's cause. 

At this camp the boys were perfected in the 
use of hand grenades, a hazardous employment 
which seemed, however, to appeal to their ad- 
venturous spirits. 

"Some sport," wrote one of the boys to 
his mother at home, "would like to feed the 
Boche about a ton or more." 



CHAPTER II 

The Baccarat Sector 

IT was now apparent to the dullest mind that 
the hour of the great trial could not be far 
distant. All the grim panoply of modern 
warfare, gas masks, steel helmets and hand 
grenades had been issued and the men were 
trained as well as troops could be trained, out- 
side of the shock of actual warfare. 

It may be well, at this time, in order to under- 
stand the movements of the Company towards 
the front, to undertake a short resume of the 
general operations in which the Company 
formed a small but necessary link. 

When it became apparent to the Allied High 
Command that the American troops were to ap- 
pear in France in much greater numbers and at 
a far earlier period than our friends had sup- 
posed, or, the foe had expected, the selection of 
their place in the line became a problem of 
vital importance. Certain important elements 
in the English and French General Staff were 
against an independent American army, holding 
that it would be better to incorporate the Ameri- 
can troops as reserves with the French and Eng- 



32 THE READING MILITIA 

lish armies as they existed. General Pershing 
steadily opposed this proposed policy. With an 
acute farsightedness, which events have since 
justified, he contended that the American army 
must and would fight as a unit. Happily, for 
the future of Democracy he won his point. It 
was then determined that the existing operations 
and arrangements would be least disturbed if 
the Americans took their place in the right of 
the Allied line. The American front formed a 
liason with the French, at a point a few kilo- 
meters west of Toul, and at this time extended 
to the east of Luneville, where it joined the 
Eighth French Army under General Gerard. 

This arrangement of the First American Sec- 
tor enabled our troops to develop their great 
bases of Bordeaux, Brest and St. Nazaire, and 
to perfect their lines of communication directly 
through Touraine and Burgundy without inter- 
fering with the lines of communication of either 
the French or English. The great depots, store 
houses and training camps which were to feed 
the mighty army which we eventually put on the 
front, were scattered along these lines of com- 
munication. 

The brunt of the first fighting fell upon four 
sorely tried divisions, the First, Second, Twenty- 



THE BACCARAT SECTOR 33 

sixth and the Forty-second. The Reading Com- 
pany, as has been stated, belonged to the Forty- 
second Division, commanded by Major General 
Charles T. Menoher. It had not been expected 
that the Americans would engage so early in 
such large numbers. However, when the Ger- 
mans broke through between Soissons and 
Noyon, in their frantic drive in March, 1918, 
they crumpled Gough and the Fifth English 
Army like an old glove and threatened Paris 
itself. It was well for the Allied Cause that the 
Americans were there, brave, devoted and well- 
trained, to act as reserves for the harrassed 
French and English. Each of the four divisions 
alluded to had a normal strength of about twenty- 
six thousand men, but usually mustered far below 
that number. Each had a nucleus of regular 
troops with which were incorporated certain 
elements of militia, such as the Company whose 
fortunes we now follow. 

It was on February 20th, at 2:15, of a bitterly 
cold morning, that the Company started for the 
lines. They hiked to Langres, where they en- 
trained in box cars at 5 :30 in the morning. The 
men were nearly frozen. With the improvidence 
of youth, they started a fire on the floor of one 
of the cars. It was soon put out, because, as 



34 THE READING MILITIA 

one of the boys naively explains, "We couldn't 
stand the smoke." In all their distress and 
anxiety of mind, they found time for the in- 
evitable crap game. This, however, had a trag- 
ical ending when Sergeant Ludwig's twenty 
franc note flew out of the door and vanished 
down the track. That day they rolled slowly 
to the north, to the sound of heavy cannonading, 
and at five o'clock in the morning of February 
21st they arrived at the little town of Moyen 
and began their hike up to the lines. All day 
they passed through a ravaged countryside, from 
which the civil population had long since fled. 
The villages were in ruins and occupied only 
by troops who were waiting to go up into the 
trenches. The roads were in frightful shape 
from the constant passing and repassing of ar- 
tillery and transport. The Company finally ar- 
rived at the half-demolished town of Giriviller, 
where they found some French troops, also the 
One Hundred and Forty-ninth, One Hundred 
and Fiftieth and One Hundred and Fifty-first 
Machine Gun Battalions, all in a state of hope- 
less confusion. 

The Company rested over Washington's 
Birthday and February 24th, and left on the 
morning of February 25th for what was to be 



THE BACCARAT SECTOR 35 

an eighteen-mile hike to the village of Bena- 
menil. This latter place was only five kilometers 
from the trenches. Aeroplanes, friendly and 
hostile, hovered constantly overhead. The roar 
of the artillery was continuous and deafening. 
At night the glow of the north horizon reminded 
the boys of the blast furnaces in their native 
county. Ambulances were constantly passing 
with their pitiful loads. Fearless youth, how- 
ever, grows callous to the most disturbing con- 
ditions. In the midst of all this clamor and 
misery, the most important entry which Sergeant 
Smith can conceive of for the diary, is that he 
has a real white bed spread and that Sergeant 
Gring is enjoying a cot. These comforts, how- 
ever, were to be short-lived. The boys were for- 
bidden to congregate in groups, as these might 
be marked by the watchful Boche, who hovered 
constantly overhead. They stood about through 
the whole of the nerve-racking day and watched 
the high explosives bursting about them. The 
Captain went up to the front line upon an in- 
spection trip. In the afternoon they saw their 
first aeroplane battle. 

On February 27th, Captain Kestner, who had 
so well and devotedly led the Company from its 
departure from Reading, was relieved of com- 



36 THE READING MILITIA 

mand and Lieutenant Joseph W. Brooks was 
appointed as Company Commander. Lieutenant 
Brooks was a New Yorker and a graduate of 
Williams College. He had been a notable foot- 
ball player and was well qualified to lead men, 
as the event will show. He was twenty-seven 
years of age and came from the One Hundred 
and Fiftieth Machine Gun Battalion. The offi- 
cer directly over him, at that time, was Major 
William Hall. 

That afternoon the officers, platoon sergeants 
and leaders went up to the second line trenches 
and at six o'clock the first platoon started after 
them, the others following in ten-minute in- 
tervals. It was an intensely dark and dreary 
night, with a steady downpour of rain. The 
Company remained in the support trenches for 
three hours and then returned to their billets. 

On March 1st, Lieutenants Carman, Trapnell, 
MacKall and Reidnor were relieved of command 
and transferred to other units. They were suc- 
ceeded by Lieutenants Hamlin, Shelledy and 
Rowse. 

On March 2d came the Company's real bap- 
tism of fire. They left Benamenil at nine o'clock 
and had scarcely reached the third line trenches 
when the wary Boche opened up a lively bar- 



THE BACCARAT SECTOR 37 

rage fire, followed by a gas attack. The Berks 
boys remained in the trenches for ten eventful 
days, from March 3d to March 12th inclusive. 
They grew accustomed to life in the trenches 
and experienced the usual vicissitudes of bar- 
rage, both light and heavy, gas attacks and alarm 
of actual conflict. They were supported by the 
One Hundred and Forty-ninth Artillery and also 
by a French Battery. On the second day, how- 
ever, the Boche got the range of the American 
guns and scored two direct hits upon the One 
Hundred and Forty-ninth Artillery with ghastly 
results. The Germans were employing twelve- 
inch shells, which exploded with terrific noise, 
leaving a hole six feet across. Lieutenant 
Arseneau and Sergeant Smith made an exciting 
trip back to the base for supplies, walking hand 
in hand with death the entire distance. 

On March 6th Private Sharp was wounded by 
a bursting shell and Bugler Folk was hit on the 
left hand. Private Sharp had a message for the 
Company Commander. He devotedly refused 
any dressing for the wound until he had deliv- 
ered his message. The casualties were soon for- 
gotten in the joyful advent of eleven bags of 
Reading mail. 



38 THE READING MILITIA 

On March 8tli, at 10:30 in the morning, Pri- 
vate Kotouche was struck and instantly killed 
by a fragment of a bursting shell. The bom- 
bardment was continuous and appalling. The 
Germans were masters of the air and directed 
the fire of their own artillery without any ap- 
parent disturbance. The One Hundred and 
Forty-ninth Artillery, maddened by the losses 
of their comrades, were firing at the rate of 
twelve shots per minute and the French were not 
far behind them. In the midst of this inferno 
came the news from the right sector of the Read- 
ing line that Sergeant Ludwig and Corporal 
Gehring had been killed. No member of the 
Company but had a hair-breadth escape during 
this appalling period. Each wondered whose 
turn would come next. The old Berks County 
pluck asserted itself and the boys fired until their 
machine gun barrels were red-hot. At last, 
when it seemed that flesh and blood could stand 
the strain no longer, the Company was relieved 
and ordered back to Benamenil, where they as- 
sembled in the field Y. M. C. A., drank hot choc- 
olate and greeted each other as men returned 
from the grave. 

The next day they retraced their steps to 
Moyen, where the Company was inspected and 



THE BACCARAT SECTOR 39 

reformed. They remained here en repos until 
March 20th, when they again returned to Giri- 
viller. It was at this place, on March 26th, that 
the Company was formally transferred from 
Company A, One Hundred and Forty-ninth Ma- 
chine Gun Battalion, to Company D, One Hun- 
dred and Fiftieth Machine Gun Battalion. The 
Company was then moved to the ruined village 
of Domptail and the next day passed through 
the populous town of Baccarat. Here, in con- 
trast to the utter ruin in the villages in which 
they had lately been quartered, there was some 
measure of civilian life. The shops were open 
and men and women crowded about the boys 
and made them welcome. 

The Company spent a muddy Easter at the 
French Cantonment at Voire and left for 
Reherry early next morning, where the second 
platoon, under command of Lieutenant Shelledy, 
went into the second line trenches. The rest 
of the Company remained in support for ten 
days, where they were instructed in what the 
French called Defense contre Avion, or anti- 
aircraft defense. They installed two anti-aircraft 
guns and watched with interest the emplacement 
of a huge nine-inch naval monster, the first of 
the gigantic American guns, which were later to 
blaze a way to Sedan and victory. 



40 THE READING MILITIA 

On April 11th, Lieutenant Brooks and the 
platoon leaders went upon a reconnaissance to 
the front line trenches, preparatory to relieving 
the One Hundred and Sixty-sixth Machine Gun 
Company. That evening the entire Company 
hiked up to Ancerviller, directly on the front, 
where they were to remain for ten days. All 
the letters which the writer has been able to 
peruse complain of the filthy conditions in which 
the trenches were left by their predecessors and 
of the utter waste which seemed to have obtained 
in their kitchen. The French Artillery, which 
was in support, threw over a continuous and 
lively barrage. The boys were lulled to sleep 
by the whistling of the shells, while the Ger- 
mans maintained a sulky silence. The men were 
quartered as comfortably as possible in the damp, 
dark cellars and debris of what had once been 
a smiling village. Meals were served twice a day. 
Latrines were dug after the army regulation. 
The usual watch observed was two hours on and 
four hours in repose. The officers placed their 
machine guns to best advantage and then all 
settled down to the monotony of trench life and 
watched the aerial battles which went on over- 
head. They cheered towards evening when a 
German plane came floating down apparently 
fatally struck, but in the end, the aviator righted 



THE BACCARAT SECTOR 41 

himself and made off in the direction of the 
Rhine. 

The tedium was broken on April 14th by the 
appearance of a German scout who was discov- 
ered and fired upon at a distance of only a few 
hundred feet and who returned the fire, shooting 
through the stock of Corporal Jarrette's machine 
gun. On the same day, Acting Sergeant Hos- 
tetter was wounded and sent to the Base Hospital 
at Baccarat. Detachments of the men went out 
into "No-Man's Land" for nightly reconnais- 
sances in the hope of potting the Boche sharp- 
shooters. They saw several, but were unable to 
reach them. The first section of the second pla- 
toon was located a little to the right of the main 
body in a grove. It was a critical position enough, 
being bombed all day and gassed at night, but 
the humor of the boys was not to be denied and 
they dubbed the place "Carsonia Park." 

On April 20th, in a light fall of snow, the 
Company started to move out of the trenches 
and marched to Merviller. The weather had 
been steadily bad and the plastic Lorraine mud 
became more and more harrassing. The morale 
of the boys was at low ebb after their irksome 
stay in the trenches. It required all the efforts 
and resources of the officers to keep up the 



42 THE READING MILITIA 

standard of discipline. The Company was now 
quartered in another of the ruined villages which 
they had come to know so well. The cellars had 
been converted into damp, dark dugouts, only 
tolerable in the reflection of how much worse 
the quarters had recently been. At this critical 
juncture the boys were cheered by the arrival 
of the One Hundred and Forty-ninth Field Ar- 
tillery Band. The men wept for joy at the sound 
of American tunes. 

On the 24th the Company was moved still 
further back to Neufmaisons, where they were 
billeted. The surroundings here were pleasanter 
than they had been for some time and the Com- 
pany was cheered by the presence of a Y. M. 
C. A. station with a real American girl to pour 
the chocolate. 

On the 27th Lieutenants Brooks and Hamlin 
took the first platoon of fifty-one men who had 
been ordered to Baccarat, to undergo a course 
of instructions in trench raiding. 

On May 2d the artillery fire was of an un- 
precedented intensity and the Company knew 
that some unusual offensive was in preparation. 
Later in the day came orders to have the men 
ready to move up to the lines that same evening. 
Accordingly, at nine in the evening, in a steady 



THE BACCARAT SECTOR 43 

drizzle, the Company moved over the muddy 
roads to the Ancerviller sector of the front, 
which they reached at midnight. The sky was 
aglow with the continual explosions of the heavy 
pieces. The first platoon had gone on ahead into 
the inferno, and the rest of the men unloaded 
the machine guns and made ready for whatever 
the fates should send them. Callous as the boys 
had grown, they all remarked on the violence 
of the barrage. The earth seemed to quiver after 
the discharge of the heavy railroad pieces. "They 
were shooting a blue streak," records the imper- 
turbable Smith, "and they sure did raise hell." 
At about 5:30 in the morning the missing pla- 
toon appeared with clothing torn and smeared 
with blood. They were covered with mud from 
head to foot and only to be compared with a 
bunch of football players coming from a muddy 
field. The Reading heroes had been as far as 
the Boche third line trenches, had set up their 
machine guns there and held their position with 
cool daring, until the raiding party was ready 
to withdraw. It is worthy of note that this was 
the first time that a machine gun had been taken 
over the top by an American raiding party. 
Several of the raiders had been severely wound- 
ed, but there had been no mortalities. Sergeant 
Jarrette, who had been at the fore-front in the 



44 THE READING MILITIA 

raid, received the congratulations of the Com- 
pany Commander. As soon as the wounds had 
been bound up and the paraphernalia collected, 
the Company left the field, just as the sun was 
arising over the Lorraine hills, and arrived again 
at their barracks at 9:45, where all hands 
promptly went to sleep. 

On May 8th came a very welcome and merited 
promotion to Lieutenant Brooks, who was made 
a Captain. He was given an ovation by the Com- 
pany. The Company stayed at Neufmaisons for 
three weeks, until May 14th. It was a dreary 
period on the whole, punctuated only by drills 
on the rifle-range and games of baseball between 
the showers. All the letters written at this period 
bear testimony to the vileness of the weather. 
The excitement of the actual fighting in the 
trenches had subsided and the boys became again 
discouraged and homesick. The days were passed 
in the succession of cloudy skies overhead and 
under foot the continuous clinging of the Lor- 
raine mud. Small wonder that the note of home- 
sickness is the predominant one in the records 
of this period. 

The Company moved on to Montigny, where 
they remained from the 14th to the 21st of May. 
Here, while not engaged in actual fighting, they 



THE BACCARAT SECTOR 45 

were subject to frequent gas attacks and became 
proficient in the use of their masks, of the Eng- 
lish model, which had been furnished to them. 
They were under continual bombardment and 
had grim evidence of the accuracy of the enemy's 
aim, when a complete hit was registered on one 
of their machine guns, smashing it to fragments. 
All their comrades who had been wounded in 
the trench raids were well cared for in the Base 
Hospital at Baccarat. 

On May 14th Corporal Ludwig was promoted 
to a Sergeancy and Privates Belong, Fry and 
Behm to Corporals. The spring was now far ad- 
vanced on the Lorraine hills. The beautiful 
verdure of the early French summer was be- 
ginning to make itself apparent. The same birds 
came back from the south land, which the boys 
were accustomed to seeing at home; the same 
flowers that bloomed in Berks County were be- 
ginning to be seen in this devastated land. The 
boys knew that their hours of respite were draw- 
ing to a close and that they must soon again 
take their place on the battle line. 

On May 21st they turned in their extra 
blankets and heavy overcoats and made ready 
for the return trip to the trenches. It was late 
in the evening when they moved out from Mon- 



46 THE READING MILITIA 

tigny and made for their old station in the 
Ancerviller sector. A German aeroplane had 
been brought down that same afternoon and its 
outlines were dimly seen in "No-Man's Land," 
directly in front of the Reading sector. 

Their first days in the trenches were unevent- 
ful, except for the periodical appearance of 
enemy aeroplanes. These must have located their 
position with more or less accuracy, for on May 
26th the enemy began shelling the American po- 
sition with gas shells. The day passed in the 
succession of gas attacks and amidst tremendous 
artillery fire. The whole country side, as far 
back as Montigny, was literally drenched with 
gas. The full horror of this form of attack soon 
became apparent. Those of the boys whose bod- 
ies were in any way moist with perspiration had 
their skins eaten into by the insidious gas. They 
lay writhing in agony and the more serious cases 
had to be carried to the Base Hospital. The 
enemy were using their heaviest pieces and 
dropped two one hundred and five millimeter 
shells within two hundred feet of the post com- 
mand. It was a close call. The Alabama Militia, 
who held the sector to the right of the Reading 
boys, were less fortunate or less skillful in the 
use of their gas masks. They suffered sixty cas- 



THE BACCARAT SECTOR 47 

ualties. This frightful experience continued 
until five o'clock in the morning, when the firing 
gradually died down. Shortly afterwards the 
boys were puzzled to see what was apparently 
an American aeroplane being brought down by 
their own guns. It turned out to be a machine 
which had been captured by the Boche and sent 
back by them for a reconnaissance. 

The long course of vigorous training which 
the Company had undergone now began to bear 
fruit. Their positions were well taken and skill- 
fully conceived. Their guns were planted in a 
way which earned the commendation of the Reg- 
imental Commander. 

^^ On May 27th the Captain laconically records, 
"Now have sixteen guns on the line, having util- 
ized our four reserve guns. Ready for any 
emergency." The emergency nearly came that 
same evening when the Alabama troops and the 
French repulsed a particularly vicious attack, 
coupled with a heavy barrage and gas. With 
the coming of the dawn, the Berks lads could 
count forty German dead, hanging on the barbed 
wire to the right of their position. All that day 
the Company was kept on the alert as the firing 
was incessant. The expected attack, however, 
did not materialize. Sergeant Smith, who had 



48 THE READING MILITIA 

been sent back to Baccarat with dispatches, was 
caught in a gas bombardment and had an ex- 
citing time getting the gas mask upon his refrac- 
tory horse. 

May 30th was Memorial Day and all their 
thoughts went back to the happy anniversary 
of a year before, when they had marched out 
to the Charles Evans Cemetery. The contrast to 
their present position was marked indeed. The 
boys were worn and harrassed by loss of sleep, 
continual bombardment and the strain of watch- 
fulness. "Will it ever end?" writes one of the 
lads to his sweetheart at home. "It is like a 
raging furnace." Many of the letters written at 
this period express the hope that if death comes 
it will be a clean hit, and that they will not suffer 
the tortures of their gassed companions. 

On May 31st came a more than welcome re- 
lief. The Company hiked back to Reherry in 
a state bordering on collapse. Their respite, 
however, was short. The Allied line was so 
thinly held that seasoned troops were continually 
needed. 

At nine o'clock on the evening of June 4th, 
the platoon moved out at fifteen minute intervals 
to the Montigny sector, where they again took up 
front line positions. The enemy seemed to have 



THE BACCARAT SECTOR 49 

an intuition that the trench garrison was being 
changed and welcomed them with a particularly 
heavy barrage. Forty of the boys who were in 
a dug-out had a miraculous escape when a nine- 
inch shell struck close by. Only two of them 
were wounded. Our artillery retaliated the next 
morning by bringing down a German observa- 
tion balloon with inflammable shells. 

The history of the Company's career in the 
Lorraine trenches is almost monotonous in its 
unvarying experiences. The long days passed in 
a succession of gas attacks, alarm and heavy 
barrage. The harrassed Reading boys, who a 
year before had been on the farm or in the 
workshop, were now cool intrepid veterans. 
They realized that they held the forefront of the 
battle line of civilization. But for them and 
their comrades, the Germans would probably 
have attempted a mighty stroke against Dijon 
and again have threatened Paris from the rear, 

June 10th saw the Company in its old station 
on the Ancerviller front. The indomitable Cap- 
tain Brooks was sorely smitten with fever, but 
led his platoon the entire distance. 

On the 14th of June the monotony was broken 
by the appearance of a particularly venturesome 
German, who recklessly flew low over the gun 



50 THE READING MILITIA 

positions, bombarding them with his machine 
gun. Although pursued by a continuous fire, 
he made his escape. One of the boys writes, 
"I believe he was low enough to hit with a rock. 
He sure was a nervy cuss." 

The fine weather abruptly ceased and the 
heavy rains again set in, turning the trenches 
into rivers of mud and adding inexpressibly to 
the misery of conditions. A particularly insid- 
ious gas attack on June 18th caused the Reading 
Company several casualties and killed nine of 
their mules. The devoted village of Reherry, 
which the boys had so lately left, received a 
terrible bombardment, killing seventy-three of 
the Forty-second Division who were quartered 
there. 

On June 19th the enemy registered three di- 
rect hits on the stable where the Company had 
forty-seven head of horses and mules, causing a 
ghastly havoc. 

On June 20th the Company were relieved by 
a French detachment and marveled how few 
men our war-worn allies were compelled to send 
to man the sector which they were just aban- 
doning. The mortality among the horses and 
mules handicapped the transportation severely. 
Each man was compelled to bear a double bur- 



THE BACCARAT SECTOR 5l 

den. Even then it was with difficulty that they 
were able to drag their guns, ammunition, field 
kitchen and paraphernalia. The boys hiked the 
entire night in a heavy rain, repassing through 
Baccarat and arriving at Domptail early in the 
morning. They had covered a distance of 
twenty-five kilometers, a notable achievement, 
considering the heavy burdens which they bore. 

The Company was now temporarily under the 
command of Lieutenant Rowse, Captain Brooks, 
according to the army regulations, remaining on 
the front twelve hours after the relief. The rain 
was incessant, and the boys utterly worn after 
their sleepless nights in the trenches. Neverthe- 
less, they were compelled to meet another forced 
march of twenty-eight kilometers to Morriville. 
Seven of the boys collapsed and were left behind 
in a barn on the way. It was two o'clock in the 
morning when the tired soldiers marched through 
the narrow street of Morriville. Breakfast was 
served and the men dispersed to neighboring 
hay-lofts. They were awakened by the church 
bells pealing on a beautiful Sunday morning, 
marched to their rail-head at Chatel and en- 
trained the same evening. Their few remaining 
mules were so upset by the experiences at the 
front that it was with the greatest difficulty that 
they could be forced into the cars. The soldiers 



52 THE READING MILITIA 

sat about and waited for the train to start. Some 
of them visited a German prison camp in the 
village and talked Pennsylvania Dutch with the 
prisoners. 

The train consisted of fifty wagons. It made 
its slow way across the breadth of the ancient 
province of Burgundy ; through Nancy, Toul and 
Bar-le-Duc. They passed within a few kilometers 
of the headquarters of one of the greatest sol- 
diers whom the city of Reading has ever fur- 
nished to a grateful country — Lieutenant Gen- 
eral Hunter Liggett, a Berks County lad; the 
Commander of the First American Army, who 
was at this time lodged at Neuf chateau on the 
Meuse. The Company arrived at noon on the 
24th of June, at the detrainment yard at Coolus. 
Here they were cheered by coffee served by the 
American Red Cross women and detrained their 
equipment. After a three-hours' hike they 
reached the beautiful town of Togny, which de- 
lighted them with its cleanliness and picturesque- 
ness. The next few days were devoted to a gen- 
eral clean-up. The Company were again almost 
on a peace schedule and were delighted at the 
indulgence accorded them after the horrors of 
the trenches. 



CHAPTER III 
The Champagne Front 

IN order to understand the maneuvers of the 
Reading militia company in their new field 
of action, it will be necessary to make a brief 
survey of the status of the war. 

At the little city of Charleville, near the Bel- 
gian border, in a gray walled building, which 
had once been a convent, was housed at this 
time the celebrated German General Staff. Their 
intelligence was direct and accurate; they knew 
almost to a man and a gun the extent of the 
mighty American preparation. Whatever cheer- 
ing bulletins they might send forth for home 
encouragement, they themselves had no illusions. 
They saw, early in the spring of 1918, that their 
U-boat warfare was ineffectual to stem the Ameri- 
can invasion. They could calculate with scien- 
tific accuracy the hour when they must event- 
ually succumb, unless this invasion could be 
checked. That was the reason for the vehement 
and gigantic attack in the western Marne sector 
in the latter days of May. It was the heroic 
Second American Division which saved the day 
and made the names of Chateau-Thierry, Bois 
de Belleau, Bouresches and Vaux, immortal ones 



54 THE READING MILITIA 

in American history. Had it not been for the 
Fifth and Sixth Regiments of Infantry the enemy 
would have obtained their object, which was the 
great Paris-Metz highway. The courageous de- 
votion of the Second American Division, coupled 
with the genius of General Degoutte, the Com- 
mander of the Sixth French Army, saved the day. 
But the foe, though checked, were not defeated. 
The number of trained American troops was 
pitably small and it was well known that the foe 
was assembling all his strength for an effort of 
unparalleled scope and ferocity. 

It was well for the Allied Cause, that Provi- 
dence had given it a leadership equal in re- 
source and brilliancy to that of the Teutons. 
From the Chateau at Chantilly, which was the 
headquarters of the French High Command, 
Marshal Foch was watching the enemy with an 
alertness and unerring military judgment which 
was to stamp him as one of the greatest generals 
of all time. With an intuition, Napoleonic in 
its genius, he divined that the blow would fall 
to the east of Rheims, in the rolling hills of 
Champagne. 

To guard against this menace, two American 
divisions were hastily withdrawn from the 
Baccarat sector and brought by train to Suippes. 



THE CHAMPAGNE FRONT 55 

They were the Twenty-sixth Division of New 
England mihtia, led by Major General Clarence 
Edwards, and the hard-fighting Forty-second or 
Rainbow Division, of which the Reading com- 
pany formed a part. In the plans and counter- 
plans of the two great General Staffs, the com- 
pany of Reading boys were as so many pawns 
moved to and fro upon a chess-board by an in- 
visible hand. The hopes and aspirations and 
futures of wives and mothers in the mountains 
of Pennsylvania were dependent on the man- 
euvers directed by the two invisible High Com- 
mands at Charleville and Chantilly. 

The peaceful hours in the cantonments at 
Togny were destined to be all too brief. The 
Company were rehearsed again in the old lesson 
of open warfare, which they had almost for- 
gotten in the contracted trenches of Lorraine. 
These maneuvers gave rise to a flood of rumors. 
It became noised about in some mysterious way 
that the Company was to take a part in the "Big 
Show," in the war of divisions rather than of 
companies. The boys were wild to start. 

On the night of June 28th, the Company, in 
battle array, filed out of their cantonment and 
soon passed through the city of Chalons sur 
Marne, the largest city which they had so far 



56 THE READING MILITIA 

encountered in France. They passed swiftly 
through the dark narrow streets, crossed the fa- 
mous river Marne and marched steadily to the 
northward. This march was the longest that 
they had made in France. By morning they had 
covered thirty-five kilometers and were glad to 
lie down in a pine wood, filled with enormous 
parks of heavy ammunition, cleverly camou- 
flaged. They were at Camp Tambeau, very near 
to the French town of Buoy and on the famous 
River Vesle, which was to run red with Ameri- 
can blood. 

The Company remained here two days, when 
they received an order to make ready their guns, 
ammunition, caissons and escort wagons, to 
march out on the evening of July 1st. Two days' 
travel rations were served the men, but at the 
last minute a messenger arrived on motorcycle, 
postponing the march. The Company remained 
at this camp until midnight of July 3d, when 
they marched to Ferme de Suippes, quite close 
to the third line trenches. Captain Brooks rode 
over to the headquarters of the Third Brigade 
of the One Hundred and Sixty-sixth Infantry 
and received his orders to go up into the trenches 
the same night. Accordingly, at nine o'clock, the 
Company moved out by platoons in five minute 
intervals. Sergeant Jarrette commanded the 



THE CHAMPAGNE FRONT 57 

Third Platoon in the absence of Lieutenants 
Rowse and Hamlin. The men were given orders 
to subsist the next day on their reserve rations 
of dog biscuits. By 12:30 they were settled in 
their position in the reserve line. The Allies, 
at this point, were well supplied with artillery 
and celebrated the Fourth of July by an almost 
continual barrage of seventy-five, one hundred 
and five and one hundred and fifty millimeter 
shells. The Reading soldiers had never experi- 
enced a bombardment of similar intensity. Their 
experience on the Lorraine front seemed tame 
in comparison. Each man vaguely felt that the 
"Big Show" had commenced at last. 

The tumult continued unabated. By now the 
Americans had brought up some of the famous 
naval guns, evidence of Pennsylvania genius, 
and these were thundering some miles in the 
rear. The One Hundred and Forty-ninth and 
One Hundred and Fifty-first Artillery joined in 
the chorus. The firing at night was so contin- 
uous that the individual flashes were blended 
in one blinding and vivid glare. Just behind 
the station of the Reading boys were two power- 
ful automobile searchlights, whose restless beams 
searched the air and the country side during the 
entire night. The boys remarked with pride that 



58 THE READING MILITIA 

the Boche no longer had his arrogant mastery 
of the air. In the Baccarat sector he seemed to 
come and go at will. Here in the Champagne 
the American planes were assembled by hun- 
dreds and no hostile challenge was disregarded. 
By July 6th the field kitchen had gotten up 
with warm coffee and bacon. It was a welcome 
punctuation of the biscuit diet upon which they 
had been existing the previous days. Lieutenant 
Arsenu returned from Brigade Headquarters 
with the belated Reading mail, nearly seven hun- 
dred welcome letters. That night the Company 
moved up to the second line trenches, where 
they were quartered in large fortified dug-outs. 
They learned to cleverly camouflage their stores 
by the use of wire netting covered with grass 
and foliage. 

On July 11th, amidst a bombardment on the 
most tremendous scale of modern warfare, at 
three o'clock in the morning, the first and sec- 
ond platoons moved up to the extreme advance 
positions and mounted their twelve machine 
guns. The sons of Reading held the position of 
honor; the extreme test had come. It was ap- 
parent to the dullest doughboy that a major drive 
was in preparation. The Rainbow Division at 
this time held the sector between Auberive sur 



THE CHAMPAGNE FRONT 59 

Suippe on the west and Perth les Hurlus on the 
east. The acute mind of Marshal Foch had 
divined almost to the kilometer where the blow 
was to fall. The picked American troops were 
selected to defend the direct road to Chalons, 
which with Epernay, as we now know, were 
the goal which the Germans expected to attain 
on the first day of their gigantic drive. The 
Forty-second Division was under the command 
of Major-General Charles T. Menoher and the 
entire First American Army was commanded by 
the intrepid Hunter Liggett. To the immediate 
right of the Reading boys was stationed a de- 
tachment of Chasseurs Alphins, the famous 
"Blue Devils." These made nightly raids into 
the German trenches and returned with grim 
evidence of their success. 

On July 12th the Company received its last 
orders from the Divisional Headquarters, which 
were: "In the event of an attack, hold your 
lines at whatsoever cost and retreat under no 
circumstances." The Company's machine guns 
had been placed with the most scientific care 
and the officers enthusiastically declared that 
the field of fire was never better. The first line 
trenches had been abandoned, according to the 
plan of the French Commander-in-Chief, as it 



60 THE READING MILITIA 

was known that the Germans had their exact 
range. All of the Reading machine guns except- 
ing two were mounted in what had been the 
second line trenches. These two were left one 
hundred yards out, in order to enfilade a flank 
attack. 

July 14th, the great French national holiday, 
passed in an ominous lull. Fifty-five miles away, 
on the boulevards of Paris, detachments of all 
the Allied troops united in a magnificent parade. 
Last of all came the steel-hatted American 
Marines, the heroes of Bouresches and Bois de 
Belleau. As they marched along, the acclaim 
of the crowded spectators arose almost to a 
frenzy in their ovation to the men who had 
saved France. Late that night, as the residents 
of the eastern suburbs, in Pantin and Joinville, 
were retiring, they could descry a red glow in 
the eastern horizon and hear the faint rattle 
that betokened artillery of the heaviest calibre 
firing ninety kilometers away. The great drive 
was on. 

"The great drive is on." This is the entry 
which Sergeant Smith, in all the stress of excite- 
ment, found time to write at one minute after 
midnight on July 15th. Five hours later the 
boys were still clinging to their positions, al- 



THE CHAMPAGNE FRONT 61 

though the entire appearance of the terrain had 
been changed by the terrific bombardment which 
they had undergone. The Germans were bom- 
barding with over one thousand pieces of ar- 
tillery and their huge shells were falling twenty- 
five miles in the rear, in Meaux and Coulom- 
miers. The lurid atmosphere reeked with gas 
and the boys' eyes burned like fire, through hav- 
ing worn the masks continuously for five hours. 
The official record of the Forty-second Division, 
now on file at the War College in Washington, 
contains the dry statement: 

"Enemy attack along the whole line at 
seven in the morning." The full meaning 
of this notation can best be expressed by the 
record of one of the Reading heroes, made 
next day: 

"Seven in the morning, liason from 
Third Platoon rush into the P. C, reported 
the Boche through the line on the right. 
Captain Brooks orders the reserve guns 
mounted and calls for volunteers to go out 
through the bombardment to the ammuni- 
tion dump for more ammunition. Private 
Hanson and I reach the ammunition dump, 
break the tops of the boxes with an old pick, 
and come back with as many clips as we 



62 THE READING MILITIA 

could carry. Oh! what an experience! 
Reached my gun and I just tested same by 
passing half a clip through, when Sergeant 
Rettger's liason reports that the First Pla- 
toon had all been lost. Our blood boiled. 
I changed my gun position slightly to give 
a good field of fire, covered a communi- 
cating trench and said: 'Let the God 
damn Boche come.' The bombardment got 
heavier if anything. Two Boche planes ap- 
peared directly overhead and peppered us 
with machine guns. Sergeant Rettgers and 
what was left of his section came running 
in and reported their guns lost." 

"Eight A. M. — Boche planes with ma- 
chine guns came like flocks of birds. It 
looked bad for us. Runner from the French 
to know if we can hold our lines. Corporal 
Smith killed. Privates Epler and Karausta 
killed. Private Hickman suffered horribly 
from gas. Died." 

"Ten-thirty A. M. — Liason from Second 
Platoon report: Lost a gun. Private Hous- 
ton killed by high explosive. Could see 
lines of Boche attacking in their big hel- 
mets." 



THE CHAMPAGNE FRONT 63 

"Twelve-thirty P. M. — Boys nearly dead 

frora continuous fighting and lack of food. 

Started back for the field kitchen to see 

what I could get. Passed many dead men 

on the way. One of them shot in half. 

Acting Sergeant of Company I horribly 

mangled." 

"Seven P. M. — Attack seems completely 

repulsed. French warn us to be ready for 

a counter attack." 

Such is the modest record of a heroic day. 
He must be callous, indeed, who can read this 
laconic record without a quickening of the pulse 
and a thrill of pride, at the noble way in which 
these boys acquitted themselves in their hour 
of trial. 

The Germans had captured both of the out- 
lying Reading guns. Private Willis P. Snyder, 
a Cotton street lad, showed rare heroism in fight- 
ing his gun to the last and endeavored to save 
a number of his wounded comrades. For his 
bravery he was awarded both the Croix de 
Guerre and the Distinguished Service Medal. 

Private Snyder, back to work-a-day life in 
Reading and not at all disposed to regard him- 
self as a hero, gives the following version of the 
incident: 



64 THE READING MILITIA 

"We were pretty far out in front of the 
rest of the bunch. Our two guns were well 
placed, so as to command the two communi- 
cation trenches. We hadn't been told the 
first line trenches had been abandoned but 
thought the French were still there. By 
morning we were all nearly crazy with the 
awful bombardment. It was broad daylight 
when they came and there seemed to be 
thousands of them coming through the 
bushes. At first we thought they were 
Trogs,' for most of them wore French uni- 
forms. Suddenly Corporal Smith, who 
commanded our gun, said: 'My God! 
they're Boche.' He jumped on the gun and 
fired perhaps two belts when he was hit in 
the brain and dropped. I took the gun and 
fired like mad. I couldn't very well miss 
them, they were so close. I remember 
Karausta come running up to me, telling 
me that Epler and Burkey had been killed 
and the other gun taken, then all of a sud- 
den the Boche were on top of me. I lit out 
at them and they at me. A couple of them 
were tearing at my pack. They tell me I 
tried to pull Karausta's body along but I 
don't remember anything more until I was 
back in the reserve trenches." 



THE CHAMPAGNE FRONT 65 

Such courage and modesty was not to go un- 
noticed. The great Petain, under his own sig- 
nature, testified to the achievement of a gallant 
Reading boy.* 

July 16th was a harassing day under continual 
bombardment. The struggle seemed to have 
shifted a little to the left, where the French were 
receiving the full fury of the enemy's attack. 
The Company were at last able to evacuate their 
severely wounded, including Privates Dough- 
erty, Larson, Burkey, Snyder, Artz and Wil- 
liams. The surrounding ground was compared 
by one of the boys to a sieve, so pit-marked was 
it by the bombardment. 

They might well be proud of their achieve- 
ment. The Forty-second American Division and 
Twenty-first French Corps had repulsed a major 
attack by five German divisions, viz: — the 
Guard Cavalry Division (dismounted), the Sec- 

Citation de Willis P. Snyder 
Tous ses Camarades ayant 6te tu§s ou blesses a 
continue a manoeuvrer les mitrailleuses et dans le 
corps a corps qui suivit a force I'ennemi a se retirer. 
Bien que blesse a essaye de ramener ses camerades 
blesses. Son courage et son abnegation ont fait 
radmiration de tous ceux qui I'ont approche. 
Au Grand Quartier General, 

PETAIN, 
Marecbal de France. 
Le 16 Avril, 1919. 



66 THE READING MILITIA 

ond Bavarian Landwehr, the Eighty-eighth Di- 
vision and the Seventh Saxon Division. They 
penetrated the American and French trenches 
at various points, but were only able to hold a 
part of their gains. Their loss had been tre- 
mendous. Our losses had also been serious. 
Lieutenant Hamlin and his heroic platoon were 
nearly all prostrated from the effects of gas. 
They had held the center position, command- 
ing the road into Suippes. 

While the Allied front under the command 
of Gouraud, that is to say, the territory between 
Rheims and Massiges, had been held, the 
enemy had been more successful on General 
Berthelot's front, between Chateau-Thierry and 
Cailly. Here he succeeded in getting six divisions 
across the Marne. The storm burst with tre- 
mendous fury upon the Thirteenth and Thirty- 
eighth Regiments of the Third American Divi- 
sion. It was a critical moment. The Germans 
were able, in the next two days, to pour a tre- 
mendous fire upon the position of the Forty- 
second Division. It is estimated that the enemy 
employed eighty-four batteries in continuous 
bombardment. This bombardment kept the 
Reading Company in the trenches during the 
entire day of July 17th. A small detachment, 
headed by Captain Brooks, went out at night 



THE CHAMPAGNE FRONT dl 

into "No-Man's Land" to look for the lost gun 
posts. With consummate audacity, they made 
their way over a front literally carpeted with 
dead Germans. They found the gun intact. 
Corporal Smith, who commanded it, was lying 
beside it, his face to the foe. He had been bay- 
oneted in the throat. His two assistant gunners 
lay behind him. The Captain reverently removed 
the personal effects from the dead men's bodies 
and the detachment started back to the lines, 
bringing the lost guns with them. 

On the 18th of July, the intense bombard- 
ment began to lessen. The general order for a 
counter attack was at once given. Far to the 
left, Mangin and Degoutte began their advance 
on the plateau of Etrepilly. The Reading boys, 
however, were in no shape to take part in this 
maneuver. Flesh and blood could stand no 
more. They had acquitted themselves well and 
earned a citation from the American Com- 
mander-in-Chief. 

On the morning of July 19th they were re- 
lieved. There was some delay in this movement 
and it was not until 3:45 and quite light, when 
the Company left their trenches. The watchful 
German observation balloons detected the man- 



68 THE READING MILITIA 

euver at once and laid down a heavy barrage. 
The men ran for safety as fast as their heavy 
loads would permit. Many of the relieving in- 
fantry were killed before they could gain the 
trenches. Fatigued as they were, the Company 
were compelled to make a twenty-five kilometer 
march to Cuperly. The roads were choked with 
troops and artillery passing up to the front. The 
rumor of victory was in the air. The soldiers 
going up cheered the ragged, blood-stained Read- 
ing heroes as they staggered past. They arrived 
at a wood near Cuperly about nine in the eve- 
ning of the 20th. A huge German plane crashed 
down almost in their midst, but the boys were 
too tired to take much interest in the occurrence. 
They bathed in a little creek; pitched their dog 
tents and enjoyed an eight-hour sleep. On the 
next day there was a pretty ceremony when Gen- 
eral Gouraud and his entire staff came to for- 
mally congratulate the heroic division. 

On the night of July 22d the Company hiked 
to the entrainment point at Saint Hilaire and 
boarded box cars for an unknown destination. 
It was known that the Germans had the exact 
range of this place, and only the night before 
had bombed an American troop train. Some of 
the soldiers were still scattered in the surround- 



THE CHAMPAGNE FRONT 69 

ing woods, to which they had fled after the raid. 
As the train made its slow way in a westerly 
direction, the clamor of the front died down and 
they passed out of the zone of war. 

For two days the boys traveled through a 
beautiful smiling country side, as yet untouched 
by the horrors of war. The unwonted sight of 
a trolley car brought tears to their eyes and 
evoked a round of cheers. Their tortuous course 
took them almost into the suburbs of Paris. 
They could see, against the southern horizon, a 
marble dome which the Captain told them was 
the Church of the Sacre Coeur, on the heights 
of Mont Marte. They passed through the great 
rail-head of Noisy le Sec, detrained at Esbly, 
almost midway between Chateau-Thierry and 
Paris, and hiked to the semi-ruined town of 
Nantovillet. The noise of the front grew in 
volume before them and they surmised that they 
would soon be at close grips with the enemy 
again. 

At nine in the morning they marched out for 
what was to be an all day thirty-kilometer hike 
to Mareuil, on the River Marne. The boys en- 
joyed a belated swim which, however, had a 
tragic ending in the drowning of Private Nelson 
Bowers. He was buried with military honors 
next day. 



70 THE READING MILITIA 

During the afternoon a convoy of French 
camions and motor trucks, operated by Annam- 
ites, arrived at the camp. The emergency 
rations were issued, while the men loaded their 
guns and equipment, knowing that they were 
once more going up into the furnace. They 
passed through the tortured town of Chateau- 
Thierry, crossed the bridge over the Marne, 
which American valor had held against ten-fold 
odds, and rode steadily to the north. Callous as 
they had grown to the awful evidence of war, 
they were struck by the utter horror of the 
country through which they passed. 

"Dead Boche scattered everywhere and 
badly decomposed," writes one of the boys. 
"We are all of the same color from dust and 
the roads in an awful jam, owing to the 
thousands of men and supplies going to the 
front in trucks." 

Late that night they reached a wood near St. 
Germain which the Captain describes as literally 
saturated with gas. There was no water with 
which to prepare a meal and the men had not 
eaten since half-past six that morning. This 
wood had been the scene of a Homeric combat 
but two days before, in which one American 
company of two hundred and fifty had been 
wiped out to the last man. 



THE CHAMPAGNE FRONT 71 

On July 26th the Company advanced toil- 
somely through a heavy rain to Foret Maison du 
Bois. The gallant Twenty-sixth or Yankee Di- 
vision had swept over this terrain, taking a huge 
toll in guns and prisoners; the decomposed 
corpses of men and horses were scattered every- 
where, and the stench was almost insupportable. 
The boys lay in the soggy wheat fields all night. 
Morning found them directly next to the em- 
placement of one of the gigantic guns with which 
the Germans had amazed the world. The gun 
itself was gone but the base with the attending 
railroad, machine shop and equipment was still 
there. One of the lads compared it to a loco- 
motive turntable at the Reading Car Shops. The 
men were amazed to see the enormous pyramids 
of ammunition which the enemy had left be- 
hind in his flight. They had been taught to be- 
lieve that the German ammunition was at low 
ebb but saw no evidence of this in the enormous 
booty at hand. 

On the next day they advanced to Beauvardes. 
The Reading Company was now in reserve for 
the first time, as they proudly note, since the 2d 
of March. The bombardment was appalling. 

At three o'clock on the morning of the 27th 
the Company was groping its way along the road 



72 THE READING MILITIA 

to Ferme de Ferret. It was evidently suicidal 
to follow the road any further, as the enemy 
appeared to have the exact range. Captain 
Brooks ordered the Company to scatter into the 
neighboring woods with their carts. It was too 
late. The great marmites were falling with 
pitiless accuracy. The animals were maddened; 
the Company was in inextricable confusion. The 
enemy took a fearful toll. Cook Oberdorf was 
killed and his field kitchen blown to pieces. 
Corporal Bowers was horribly mangled and died. 
Privates Pliss and Kissinger were instantly 
killed by high explosives. The skull of Private 
Briel was fractured. Sergeants Bingaman and 
Smith, with devoted heroism, went out into the 
open field and rescued Private Troutman, who 
had been badly wounded. After some hours the 
Company formed in the woods, in assemblance 
of order, and took account of their casualties. 
These had been severe: Privates Weidner, 
Kompa, Stauffer, Shuker, Eckenroth, Austin, 
Troutman and Briel had been severely wounded. 
Sergeant Ludwig, Privates Reifsnyder, Shappell 
and Tobias were also wounded. No ambulance 
could be secured until 7:30 the next morning 
and the poor stricken boys must bear their suf- 
ferings as best they might. Briel gave no sign 



THE CHAMPAGNE FRONT 73 

of life and it was thought he was dead. Both 
Captain Brooks and Lieutenant Arsenau had 
their horses shot. The German aeroplanes 
circled overhead, reporting every movement. 
The woods afforded a precarious shelter, the 
Boche peppering them continuously with bombs. 
They held their position the whole of that trying 
day without food or water. At 8:30 in the 
evening came bread, corn cakes, water and cig- 
arettes. All of the next day the tortured Com- 
pany clung to its position in the woods. 

"We gave ourselves up for dead," records 
Sergeant Smith. "This was the open war- 
fare to which we had looked forward. We 
found it hell in its hottest state. It was 
tough. The smell of the dead was horrible 
and the groans of our wounded nearly made 
us crazy." 

On the morning of July 29th the bombard- 
ment slackened somewhat. The Company took 
up its laborious advance to the village of La 
Folic, taken by the Americans only the day be- 
fore. The ambulances with their pitiful loads 
choked all the roads. The village was still under 
bombardment and Company D took shelter in a 
large farm yard. They were desperately hungry 
and eagerly shared a gallon of maple syrup and 
some cans of salmon. 



74 THE READING MILITIA 

At 4:30 in the afternoon the order was given 
to advance. This maneuver provoked such a 
heavy storm of shells that the Company were 
again forced under cover. The infantry who 
had advanced were caught in a bad trap and 
suffered severely. The officers were lodged in 
a villa, which only a few hours before had been 
the headquarters of the German Command. The 
enemy were making a desperate stand in the 
village of Serenges, just ahead. From their 
cellars the boys could observe the effect of the 
Allied fire and see the devoted village gradually 
disintegrating. They watched the church steeple 
for some time, until finally the whole tower fell 
down into the edifice. In all their distress they 
found time to admire the intrepidity of the 
American ambulance drivers racing in and out 
of the village. Private Wentzel was detailed as 
a runner to Brigade Headquarters with dis- 
patches, but had scarcely shown himself when 
he was shot through both legs. At 7:30 in the 
evening. Lieutenant Arsenau managed to get up 
some food which was trebly welcome to the 
famishing boys. One gas attack succeeded an- 
other. 

At three o'clock in the afternoon a Lieutenant- 
Colonel from the One Hundred and Sixty-fifth 



THE CHAMPAGNE FRONT 75 

Regiment rushed in with the intelligence that 
Serenges had fallen and ordered the Company 
to advance their gun positions. The appalling 
strain through which the men had passed was 
beginning to have its effects. Some of them had 
gone insane. It was deemed impossible to ad- 
vance, as the heavy shells were falling contin- 
uously. One of them demolished three houses 
directly across the street from the point where 
the Reading boys were stationed. Oddly enough, 
the Company in reserve was in a far more 
dangerous position than it would have been if 
directly at the front. Corporal Yeich was hit 
by a high explosive, inflicting thirteen wounds. 
He died thirty-five minutes later, babbling of 
Eleventh street and of the folks there. Serenges 
had fallen at last to the Irish-Americans of the 
One Hundred and Sixty-fifth Regiment, the old 
Sixty-ninth of New York, but the resistance of 
the enemy had been desperate, as many a weep- 
ing American mother could testify; word came 
back that the Boche had retreated eight kilo- 
meters. 

The Forty-second Division had been roughly 
handled and were relieved by the Fourth Divi- 
sion on the evening of August 2d. This was a 
most critical maneuver. It required the filitra- 
tion of one division through another, under the 



76 THE READING MILITIA 

direct fire of the enemy and over congested 
roads. It was, however, accomplished in a way 
which reflected credit upon the tactical training 
of the American Army. 

Company D, in single file, staggered back to 
the woods at Ferme de Ferret, where they had 
undergone the fatal bombardment on the night 
of July 28th. 

"Was one pool of mud," says one of the 
boys. "We sure were a tough bunch. Many 
of us fell by the road." 

They slept all day. In the evening the half- 
starved boys received their first warm meal 
which they had tasted for many a day. They 
were utterly unable to move any farther and 
lay in the rain and mud for a week, recuperating 
as best they could. Their losses had been so 
severe that it became necessary to reform the 
entire Company. 

Sergeants Jarrette and Smith were recom- 
mended as Second Lieutenants because of con- 
spicuous bravery shown on the field of battle. 
Corporal Queer and Corporal Pattison were pro- 
moted to Sergeants. Privates Ashford, Giles, 
Hanson, Leinbach, Daniels and Boyer were pro- 
moted to Corporals. Whatever rewards a grate- 
ful country could heap upon these gallant sol- 



THE CHAMPAGNE FRONT 77 

diers had been well earned. Their achievement 
is perhaps best summed up in the Divisional 
Citation of Major-General Charles T. Menoher: 

"Fresh from the battlefront before Chal- 
ons, you were thrown against the picked 
troops of Germany. For eight consecutive 
days you attacked skillfully prepared posi- 
tions. You captured great stores of arms 
and ammunitions. You forced the crossings 
of the Ourcq. You took Hill No. 212, 
Sergy, Meurcy, Ferme and Serenges by 
assault. You drove the enemy, including an 
Imperial Guard Division, before you for a 
depth of fifteen kilometers. When your in- 
fantry was relieved it was in full pursuit of 
the retreating Germans and your artillery 
continued to progress and support another 
American division in the advance of the 
Vesle." 

It must be noted that with the end of the 
Marne- Vesle campaign ended the period of 
French Command. The gallant First American 
Corps, whose fortunes we have been following 
under General Hunter Liggett, had functioned 
as a part of the Sixth French Army. This was 
the first time that we had a Corps organization 
in tactical command of troops, either in practice 



78 THE READING MILITIA 

or in action, since the Civil War. With the ex- 
ception of this Corps all Higher Staffs were 
French. The organization of the First American 
Army was now to come. 

The Company appears to have stayed at the 
camp at Ferret a longer period than was con- 
templated by their superiors, because of their 
absolute inability to move. Their stay was un- 
eventful, being only punctuated on August 10th 
by a visit from the American actress, Elsie Janis, 
who delighted the boys with her singing. 

On August 13th they finally left their camp 
in the woods and marched to Villers, on the 
River Marne. Here the Forty-second Division 
received a very welcome reward for its labors, 
in the shape of a general order from General 
Menoher, permitting ten per cent, of the strength 
of each Company to go to Paris for a two-day 
holiday. Company D at this time numbered one 
hundred and forty-six men. Thirteen were se- 
lected for the trip. They were given the pick 
of the clothing of their less fortunate compan- 
ions and supplied with as much spare change 
as the Company could muster. The boys spent 
two wild days in Paris, into which they seemed 
to have crowded an inconceivable amount of 
sightseeing and taxicab riding. Incidentally, 



THE CHAMPAGNE FRONT 79 

they were caught in an air raid and had to take 
shelter in a subway station. 

On August 18th the Company left Villers-Sur- 
Marne and marched to Chateau-Thierry, where 
they entrained and rolled eastwardly along the 
great Paris-Metz main line. All day they sat at 
the open doors of their box cars, interested in 
the trail of broken bridges and ruined towns, 
which testified to the fierceness of the late strug- 
gle. 

On August 19th they debarked and marched 
to Vrecourt, where the Company, to their utter 
delight, slept in beds for the first time in many 
months and for the second time since their ar- 
rival in France. They remained in these pleas- 
ant quarters for eight days, mostly devoted to 
re-formation and hard work. 

On August 24th Lieutenant Shelledy and 
Sergeant Park were sent to the Advance School 
of Machine Gun Instruction at Gondrecourt 
while a corporal and six privates were sent to 
Signal School. On August 25th, Lieutenant 
Shivers was succeeded by Lieutenant George H. 
Pendelton. "No mail since the 29th of July," 
records one of the boys. It is a testimonial to the 
pleasantness of their stay that they found time to 
grumble over the smaller hardships which had 



80 THE READING MILITIA 

later been forgotten in the stress of conflict. 
These were Arcadian days. Life was pleasant 
and quarters comfortable in the little village on 
the Marne. Duty was in no ways relaxed, but 
there was plenty of time to sit under the shade 
of the cafe awnings and practice French with 
the village girls. The war seemed far away. 

This idyllic existence came to a rude end on 
August 29th, when the Company was ordered 
to Viocourt, sixteen kilometers away, where they 
remained until September 4th, and then trailed 
the One Hundred and Sixty-fifth Infantry the 
entire day, through the dust to Tranquiville, 
which they reached at 4:30 in the morning, 
"damn tired" from the slowness of the march. 

On the 6th of September they left Baisey le 
Cote and next day arrived at Choloy. The entire 
division, horse, foot and artillery, was moving 
like a gigantic snake in the direction of Verdun. 
By day the enormous reptile slept and concealed 
itself as best it might. With the coming of dark- 
ness it bestirred itself and wound its sinuous 
way over the muddy roads to the eastward. The 
Americans were coming in to Brest by the hun- 
dreds of thousands; all the countryside between 
Chaumont and Toul was crowded with them. 
Great events were in preparation. 



CHAPTER IV 

The St. Mihiel Drive 

TBE days which the Company had spent in 
training and rusticating after the Marne 
Campaign were days of comparative in- 
activity for the entire American Force. The 
American Army, as an individual unit, was or- 
ganized at this period. Only then did our Staff 
begin to direct the active operations of our 
troops. This, excepting in the training areas, 
had really been done by the French. The First 
Army Staff and the Corps Staffs began, for the 
first time, to function. It would, indeed, have 
been absurd for the great American nation, with 
two or three million men in the field, to fight 
any longer under foreign High Command. The 
American Commanders, now left to their own 
devices, were to demonstrate a resourcefulness 
and ability worthy of the highest military tradi- 
tion. General Pershing had long planned to at- 
tack the St. Mihiel salient. The men and re- 
sources were in his command and it was only a 
question of choosing the hour to strike. 

When the Kronprinz and his German Army 
drove upon Verdun in August, 1914, they took 
and held a huge salient in the French line, ex- 

81 



82 THE READING MILITIA 

tending as far as Fort Troyon on the Meuse and 
embracing the village of St. Mihiel. Only the 
genius of General Serrail and the heroic defense 
of the Grande Courronne had saved Verdun and 
the city of Nancy. 

From this ridge of St. Mihiel the Germans 
could not be dislodged. For four years they 
maintained an annoying dent in the French line 
which had withstood the most sanguine attacks at 
Les Eparges, Apremont and the Bois de Pretre. 
The best blood of France had been poured out 
like water to flatten out this salient. It was esti- 
mated that one hundred thousand lives had been 
sacrificed in the vain attempt. One reason for 
the success of the German defense was that they 
held all the high ground and had direct obser- 
vation for their artillery; their watchers on 
the famous Mont Sec could notice the slightest 
movement in the Allied trenches. 

In the beginning of September, 1918, the 
salient was held by nine German divisions, per- 
haps ninety thousand men. Six out of the nine 
divisions were second-class troops, made up of 
Landwehr or Austrian troops. The ridge bristled 
with artillery, machine guns and wire. The Ger- 
mans deemed it impregnable and the French 
High Command was almost inclined to coincide 



THE ST. MIHIEL DRIVE 83 

in this belief. The success of the American 
movement depended on a great measure upon 
its secrecy. This was the reason for the night 
marches, about which the Reading boys grum- 
bled. As an additional cover, a feint was insti- 
tuted of a general attack in the Vosges. Skeleton 
divisions were formed at Besancon and Belfort. 
American boys on leave in Paris whispered to 
each other that our troops would soon be fight- 
ing on the Rhine. Incoming officers were told 
of it, in strictest confidence, of course, before 
they had left their transports. Everyone knew 
that we were to attack from Belfort and every- 
one was feverishly concerned that the enemy 
should not know it. Meanwhile the German 
spies were active. 

How far this gigantic hoax succeeded we shall 
probably never know. It evidently had some 
measure of success. While serving with the 
French in August, 1918, the writer was told by 
a prisoner, a Saxon artillery officer, that the 
Americans were to attack in force in Alsace and 
that the fatherland was ready to receive them. 
Nevertheless, the astute Haupt Quartier was not 
entirely deluded. They began at the last moment 
to remove their heavy artillery from St. Mihiel. 
This, however, was done in a vacillating manner 
and undoubtedly weakened the morale of their 
troops. 



84 THE READING MILITIA 

The Reading Company, now preparing to take 
its part in the gigantic attack, marched slowly 
up through Choloy and Lagny to the Foret de la 
Reine, just back of the front. They were now 
on the training ground of the first American 
Armies, the sector on which had occurred the 
early raids in the fall of 1917. Their progress 
in the dark had been very toilsome. They moved 
in echelons through a countryside literally 
choked with troops and artillery. 

On September 11th Captain Brooks, Lieuten- 
ant Pendelton, Sergeants Jarrette and Faust went 
up to the front to get a reconnaissance of the 
positions which the Company was to occupy. 
The men advanced with exasperating slowness 
over the congested roads through Mandres, 
around the famous "Dead Man's Curve" to 
Beaumont. The classic and heart-breaking rain, 
which had accompanied all the Allied offenses, 
was falling in torrents. 

Their division was supported on the right by 
the Eighty-ninth Division and on the left by the 
glorious First Division, which three divisions 
formed the Fourth Corps. The Berks lads ar- 
rived just in time. At one o'clock in the morn- 
ing began a tremendous preliminary barrage, of 
what was to be the greatest battle ever fought 



THE ST. MIHIEL DRIVE 85 

by an American Army. The French Marshal 
Petain, no mean authority, has said that with 
the exception of General Allenby's capture of 
the Turkish Army in Palestine, no large opera- 
tion in the war worked out so exactly to plan as 
did the American attack on St. Mihiel. At five 
o'clock in the morning six American divisions 
attacked simultaneously on a ten-mile front. 
One of our soldiers, in a letter to his mother in 
Reading, describes it as the most beautiful sight 
of the war. 

"Just at dawn," writes he, "the party 
started. Oh! it was grand. Thousands of 
our boys charged the Boche lines. I never 
could have believed there would be so much 
barbed wire, but they couldn't stop us. Our 
aeroplanes were so thick that they darkened 
the skies and our tanks moved like clock 
work. The Germans were firing like mad 
from their high mountain (Mont Sec), but 
nothing could stop us. Boche prisoners 
started coming back in droves. We counted 
eight hundred in one bunch. A little French 
chap kissed me in his excitement and told 
me the war was over." 

While one platoon, under Sergeant Smith, re- 
mained in support, the other two, under Sergeant 



86 THE READING MILITIA 

Jarrette and Lieutenant Shelledy, went forward. 
Captain Brooks was serving as Brigade Liason 
Officer. This is Sergeant Jarrette's narrative of 
a glorious day: 

"I was in charge of the Third Platoon and 
told to report to a platoon of the One Hun- 
dred and Sixty-fifth Infantry, to hold the 
open space between the Forty-second Di- 
vision and the First Division. Reported to 
headquarters of the One Hundred and 
Sixty-fifth Infantry, but no one could tell 
me where to go. Put my men in improvised 
trenches for protection against shell and 
rain and went out with Private Reifsnyder 
to find our positions. Gave up the search 
as the zero hour was almost at hand. 

"At 5:15 in the morning came the order 
to go 'over the top.' I knew I was in the 
wrong position, but gave the order to go 
forward. We found ourselves with part of 
the One Hundred and Sixty-sixth Infantry 
and right in front of a number of tanks; 
a position of great danger. I sent runners 
forward and at last found our places. Big 
shells and machine gun bullets were flying 
all around. We had only two casualties 
until about eleven o'clock, when we were 



THE ST. MIHIEL DRIVE S7 

ordered to take a machine gun nest on an 
opposite hill. Cook Silvey, who had begged 
to come along and see some real action, was 
shot through the right lung and died. Sev- 
eral other men were also hit in arms and 
legs. Corporal Fry's squad was put out of 
action completely. At last we silenced the 
machine gun nest and after that moved 
steadily forward to the objective which we 
had been told to hold." 

The victory had indeed been a signal one. 
On the morning of the second day the St. Mihiel 
salient existed no longer. The prisoners num- 
bered fourteen thousand, four hundred and 
thirty-nine. Four hundred and forty-three guns 
and huge supplies of ammunition had been cap- 
tured. 

The Forty-second Division was in the van of 
the attack, being opposite to the Tenth German 
Division, recently brought down from Flanders. 
This enemy division contained the famous 
Twenty-sixth Grenadier Regiment, composed 
entirely of Stoss Truppen, the best material in 
the German Army. The losses of our division 
on the first day were seven hundred and two, 
which was not large, considering the magnitude 
of the operation. 



88 THE READING MILITIA 

On the 13th of September the Company moved 
slowly over the battlefield of the day before. 
They marveled at the strength of the enemy po- 
sitions and at the huge booty which was every- 
where apparent. The foe was sullenly retiring 
beyond Thiaucourt; the entire army was de- 
lirious with joy. 

The Company remained three days in a woods, 
which had been the German artillery station. 
They had plenty of time to explore the dug- 
outs, which only a few hours before had been 
in German hands. The boys were amazed at the 
comfort in which the enemy had been installed. 
They found electric lights, beds, bath houses 
and a complete saw mill and machine shop. 
They examined all the German equipment with 
a critical eye and pronounced it to be of the very 
best. The wood was choked with artillery, which 
the enemy had abandoned in their hasty flight. 
The soldiers were employed in the next few days 
in salvaging such of the German equipment as 
was of value. Their stay at this camp was un- 
eventful on the whole, although they were bom- 
barded by intermittent long range artillery and 
by aeroplanes. 

On September 23d the boys were disconsolate 
to learn that they were to lose Captain Brooks, 



THE ST. MIHIEL DRIVE 89 

who was being sent to a Staff School. He had 
led the Company since February 27th with con- 
summate devotion and heroism. No criticism of 
an officer is so just or so searching as that passed 
upon him by his own men. The men of Com- 
pany D are unanimous in pronouncing him the 
best officer with whom they came in contact. 
On September 25th he bade farewell to the as- 
sembled soldiers. There was speech-making, not 
unmixed with tears. On the same day Lieutenant 
Shelledy and Sergeant Parks returned from their 
school. Lieutenant Shelledy then took com- 
mand. 

On September 27th the Company again ad- 
vanced to a position in the new line. The enemy 
had recovered somewhat from their late repulse 
and was shelling the new American position 
viciously. While the boys were in line for mess, 
September 30th, a huge shell dropped within 
fifty feet of the kitchen. There was fortunately 
no casualties. 

On October 1st the Company was relieved, 
loaded again on French trucks and hauled eighty- 
five kilometers to Issoncourt. It required eigh- 
teen hundred trucks to move the huge Division 
with its paraphernalia. The recently captured 
territory was not yet organized, so that rations 
were very uncertain; the boys did not get a 



90 THE READING MILITIA 

mouthful to eat the entire day. The Company 
waited two days for the mules and horses to 
catch up with them and then executed a toilsome 
hike of thirty kilometers to Thiaucourt. The 
next day they marched about the same distance 
steadily to the west. On neither day was there 
time to stop for mess. Only seasoned veterans 
could have undergone such marches in heavy 
equipment. Another major operation was in 
progress, destined to be the last one of the war. 
While the arm-chair strategists at home were 
consulting their maps and prophesying an im- 
minent attack on Metz, the American Army was 
headed in the opposite direction and moved 
swiftly up to the Forest of Argonne. 



CHAPTER V 
The Argonne-Meuse Campaign 

THE American forces engaged in the Ar- 
gonne-Meuse battle, the decisive battle 
of the war, as the event proved, were 
about ten times as large as those of General Lee 
at Gettysburg. They attacked a terrain of the 
greatest difficulty and they were opposed by sea- 
soned and formidable opponents, fighting under 
the eye of General von der Marwitz, probably 
the best of the German Field Generals. The 
Americans had many veteran troops in line, such 
as the Forty-second Division, whose fortunes we 
are following, but over half of their troops and 
of the Divisional Staffs were absolutely green 
in modern warfare. Argonne Forest had been 
considered impregnable for four years. Men 
who fought in our Civil War had compared it 
to the Wilderness in Virginia, only the Wilder- 
ness was fairly level, while the Argonne Forest 
was full of steep hills and ravines. The roads 
were bad and transportation would necessarily 
be difficult. The Hindenburg Line, the back- 
bone of the German defensive system, ran di- 
rectly through the forest. The enemy were en- 
trenched in such strength that it is doubtful if 



92 THE READING MILITIA 

any troops in the world, except the fresh, ardent 
Americans, could have dislodged them. 

The Americans engaged in all, fifteen divi- 
sions. The attack was begun by General Liggett 
and his First Corps on September 26th. The 
Forty-second Division, which had been brought 
around from St. Mihiel, was at first in reserve, 
but we shall find them later in close grips with 
the enemy. 

On the days of October 8th, 9th and 10th the 
Reading boys advanced through the forest. They 
were on the extreme left of the line, behind the 
Seventy-seventh Division. The violence of the 
struggle was evidenced by the number of dead 
bodies, German and American, and by the debris 
of the great battle. Montf aucon on the right was 
still holding out, although invested by the Mary- 
land drafted men of the Seventy-ninth Division. 
The Berks Company went directly through the 
wood, which was the scene of the exploits of 
Major Whittlesey and his famous lost battalion. 

On October 10th they had advanced as far 
as Apremont (not to be confounded with the 
town of the same name which figures in the St. 
Mihiel drive). Their march was necessarily toil- 
some. 



THE ARGONNE-MEUSE CAMPAIGN 93 

"Marched the whole night through the 
forest," writes one of the boys. "We went 
very slowly as the roads were jammed from 
fighting in this woods. They were carpeted 
with Boche and American bodies. Our big 
guns are all up and make us very proud. 
Saw fourteen big calibre guns, but to but. 
When our big naval guns fire as we pass it 
makes us blind and deaf for about five min- 
utes. The firing never stops." 

On the night of the 11th, in a terrific bom- 
bardment, the Company dug in on famous hill 
No. 240, above Apremont. Although not aware 
of it, they were now directly in front of the 
Kriemhilde defense system, two and one-half 
miles in depth. It was to withstand our attacks 
for nearly twenty days and to cost us tens of 
thousands of the flower of our youth. However, 
if this line could be taken, there were no pre- 
pared defenses behind it. The four-track rail- 
road from Mezieres, over which flowed the life 
blood of supplies, munitions and men for the 
German Army, would be threatened. 

There are no more intensely interesting pages 
in the diary of Sergeant Smith, to which we have 
referred so often, than those which relate of his 
experience in the next few eventful days. 



94 THE READING MILITIA 

"October 12th — Out over the lines we see 
many of our dead. Fifty-four of our pieces 
of artillery in position back of us. Thirty- 
six seventy-five milimeters, twelve howitzers 
and four naval long range guns. Barrage 
continuous and tremendous. Can hardly 
stand the noise, owing to our closeness to 
same. The very earth is trembling." 

"Four to five in the afternoon — Boche 
planes attacking our kitchen squad with 
their machine guns. Wild scrimmage for 
cover. Must dig in tonight. Fritz sending 
too many big ones across to lay in the open." 

"October 14th — Moved out at 4:45 in 
the morning. Attacked at eight in the morn- 
ing. Private Leonard killed almost in- 
stantly. I just turned long enough to see 
him fall. We advanced in full view of one 
of Fritz's observation balloons. He sure 
gave us a warm reception. Private Cahill 
shot through the leg." 

"Nine in the morning — We dug in and 
Fritz pulverized the ground over which we 
had advanced this morning. We paid dearly 
for our gains. Fritz bumped off four of our 
boys with one shell, which burst in the 
midst of a signal detachment that was ad- 



THE ARGONNE-MEUSE CAMPAIGN 95 

vancing with us. Many of our men are 
going back wounded. Dug in the side of 
another hill late in the afternoon. We were 
about all in. The bombardment never 
stops. Wagoner Shores wounded at mid- 
night. Sergeant Pattison wounded shortly 
afterwards. It began to rain and our holes 
got soaking wet. Most of us were sick with 
dysentery. Corporals Behm and Hanson 
wounded. Sergeant Conners wounded. Pri- 
vate Walsh killed. Private Arnold severely 
wounded." 

"October 16th — Still raining. Sure it is 
hell to be lying in shell holes half filled with 
mud and water and practically no food. 
First Platoon, under Sergeant Rettgers, has 
been cut off from food for the past two 
days." 

"October 17th — Liason again with the 
First Platoon. Sure glad to get food. Boche 
artillery combing the hill continuously. 
Gee! what gloom. Brought down a Boche 
plane this morning. Private Stubbeline 
shot in the stomach. Many of the boys go- 
ing down with influenza." 

The day of October 16th will go down as the 
most glorious in history of the Forty-second Di- 



96 THE READING MILITIA 

vision. It was then, after the forty-eight hours 
of punishment, which Sergeant Smith so graph- 
ically described, that the One Hundred and 
Sixty-sixth Regiment stormed the Cote de 
Chatillon, defended by the Prussian Guard, 
scrambled through the wire and bayoneted the 
Germans still kneeling at their guns. The hor- 
rors which the Berks lads endured during these 
October days can only faintly be imagined. They 
were continually attacked with gas and the bom- 
bardment never ceased. The Americans had 
been temporarily checked along the whole line 
and the Boche began to hope that the final at- 
tack might be postponed long enough to bring 
some results from their feelers for an Armistice. 
The Americans, however, were not to be denied. 
They were feverishly active, bringing up their 
artillery, building their narrow gauge railroads 
and improving their lines of communication. 
The Reading company found plenty of action 
for their guns in driving off the Boche raiders 
who came daily to attack the American obser- 
vation balloons. They brought down one enemy 
plane on the 23 d, two on the 25th and one on 
the 27th. The boys led the life of cave diggers 
in dug-outs, more or less bomb proof. Their 
progress up to this time had been slow, but all 
was now in readiness for the great drive of No- 



THE ARGONNE-MEUSE CAMPAIGN 97 

vember 1st, which was to advance the Allied line 
by kilometers instead of by yards and to end 
the war. 

The last days of October were days of prep- 
aration, amid an intense excitement. The Berks 
lads made perilous trips to the rear and brought 
up large stores of reserve ammunition. They 
were to support the great attack by indirect 
firing. That night no one slept. At 3:30 began 
a bombardment which has gone down into his- 
tory as the most terrible of the war. Far away 
to the right the Americans were pouring thou- 
sands and thousands of gas shells of yperite into 
the Bois de Bourgogne. They were using for 
the first time, a new lethal gas, which will pene- 
trate any mask. The Reading troops watched 
with awe the flashes of miles upon miles of ar- 
tillery, giving the impression, as one of them 
remarked, "Of a whole range of munition fac- 
tories on fire." 

The new American attack achieved a swift and 
decisive victory. The doughboys went forward 
like dogs loosened from a leash. In three days 
they were to advance eighteen kilometers and 
capture more than five thousand prisoners and 
a little more than one hundred guns. The 
Mezieres railroad came for the first time under 



98 THE READING MILITIA 

the direct fire of our long range guns and Hin- 
denburg telegraphed to the Emperor that the 
game was lost. 

Company D was not in the van of this last 
tremendous advance. They assisted in the pre- 
liminary barrage, firing at indirect fire for two 
and one-half hours. They then prepared to 
break camp and move forward in the direction 
of Sedan. On the morning of November 3d 
they advanced to St. Juvin, where they spent a 
miserable night in the rain, soaked to the skin, 
in a plowed field. The American line was go- 
ing forward by leaps and bounds and the Com- 
pany moved rapidly with it. On November 4th 
they reached Authe and on November 5th 
Brieullers, where their echelons again came in 
contact with the retreating enemy. On Novem- 
ber 6th they came directly into action with the 
Boche, who were sullenly retreating from the 
village of Chemery. The enemy had hoisted a 
white flag over the village to show that they 
had abandoned it. The boys fired at direct range 
and in utter disregard of a barrage which the 
Germans were throwing back to protect their 
retreat. The advance on these days was so rapid 
that the wagon trains and field kitchen could 
not keep up with the troops, so that the boys 



THE ARGONNE-MEUSE CAMPAIGN 99 

often went hungry. The Forty-second Division 
was hot on the scent of the enemy, having re- 
lieved the Seventy-eighth Division, in pursuit. 
By now the immediate rear of the retreating 
Boche had become one mass of confusion. The 
transport could not move; the infantry was 
thrown back on the supply units and extrication 
became almost impossible. The enemy was 
frantically intent on putting the River Meuse 
between himself and the impetuous Americans. 
The scent of victory was in the air and it was 
with great difficulty that the officers could con- 
trol the ardor of their troops. The Forty-second 
Division, flushed with victory, came suddenly in 
sight of the river from the heights, west of 
Remilly. Below them, across the river, was the 
historic city of Sedan, the scene of Emperor Na- 
poleon the Third's humiliating surrender to Bis- 
marck in 1870. Now ensued a desperate race 
between the First and Forty-second Divisions, 
as to which should be the first to enter the town. 
As a matter of fact, the Americans never did 
enter Sedan until after the Armistice; but the 
Forty-second Division established itself a kilo- 
meter away, across the river. The Berks Com- 
pany did not get as far as Sedan. Indeed, .they 
never saw the Meuse at this point imtil after the 
cessation of hostilities. On November 7th and 



100 THE READING MILITIA 

8th they were at Maisonelle in reserve and on 
the 10th they moved out sixteen kilometers to 
Fontenois, where an accidental explosion of 
some of their ammunition wounded Sergeant 
Queer and Private Bremen. Lieutenant Rowse 
had joined the Company some days before. 

All through the night of November 10th 
strange rumors were flying about. Self- 
important dispatch bearers were continually 
passing, who hinted at great news. The officers 
were non-committal, but everyone guessed that 
some great event was shortly to take place. On 
the momentous day of November 11th the Com- 
pany moved out at fifteen minutes past eight 
in the morning and marched fifteen kilometers 
to Blemery. At eleven o'clock, to their intense 
amazement, the awful roar of artillery, which 
had become as much a part of their life as the 
very breath in their nostrils, abruptly ter- 
minated. It appears, however, that no one really 
believed that the war was over and it was not 
until late that night that the great news was 
officially confirmed. 

"It was a wonderful sight," writes one of 
the Berks lads. "The men were celebrating 
as on the Fourth of July. The fires sprung 
up all along the line like so many stars in 



THE ARGONNE-MEUSE CAMPAIGN 101 

the sky. We sent up all the Boche rockets 
and flares which we had captured. Every- 
body was wild with joy and we saw our- 
selves back in Reading in four weeks at the 
latest." 

So, in the historic language of President Wil- 
son, the war came to an end. Three thousand 
miles away the Victory bells were ringing in the 
City of Reading. A delirious populace thronged 
the streets, scarcely daring to believe that the 
end had come. Amidst the frantic joy, it is to 
be feared that few gave a thought to the ragged, 
unkempt battalion, hiking drearily over muddy 
roads by the Meuse. And yet these lads, 
through their toils and through their sacrifices, 
had made possible the celebration in which they 
could not share. Their days of warfare were 
over. What they endured and what they 
achieved has been set down in these pages ex- 
actly and moderately, with no attempt at exag- 
geration or heroics. Let their fellow-citizens, 
who may read these lines, judge whether they 
did their duty and whether they deserve well 
of their land and of the town which sent them 
forth. 



CHAPTER VI 

The Army of Occupation 

THE days which immediately followed the 
Armistice were devoted to a general 
checking up of a roughly handled divi- 
sion. The men received a belated pay and crap 
and card games were the order of the day. The 
strain of actual warfare had passed and the bonds 
of discipline were naturally a little relaxed. 

On November 15th, Lieutenant Pendelton was 
promoted to the grade of First Lieutenant. Pri- 
vate Moodhart was made Mess Sergeant and 
Privates Spears and Wiatt were made Corporals. 
Lieutenant Rochester was assigned to the division 
with thirty-seven replacements to take the place 
of the men whom the Company had lost in the 
drive through the forest. Every possible field 
of hostilities, including Siberia, was suggested 
as the ultimate goal of the division. On Novem- 
ber 16th, however, came the definite order that 
the division was to move on into Germany. The 
Reading boys crossed the river at Stenay on No- 
vember 17th. In every direction they could see 
the enormous fortifications which the enemy had 
erected. The roads were crowded with happy 
French soldiers, liberated by the Germans and 
returning to their homes. 



THE ARMY OF OCCUPATION 103 

On November 18th, Lieutenant William Jong, 
from Wisconsin, took command of the Company. 
The weather turned quite cold with a light fall 
of snow, so that the leather jerkins, heavy socks 
and winter caps, which were issued to the men, 
were gratefully received. 

On November 21st they crossed the Belgian 
border at Limes, to the inspiring music of the 
band of the One Hundred and Sixty-fifth In- 
fantry. They were marching through a beauti- 
ful, smiling country, comparatively untouched 
and a marked contrast to the ravaged country- 
side to which the boys had lately been accus- 
tomed. All the villages were in gala attire with 
bunting and flags. Avenues of trimmed cedar 
trees were erected along the streets through 
which they passed. 

On November 23d, after a hike of thirty kilo- 
meters, the Company crossed the frontier of 
Luxembourg at Oberpallen. The inhabitants 
were German in speech and appearance, but 
gave the boys a warm welcome. The beer was 
of a quality and delighted the boys who had 
grown somewhat tired of the red wines of France. 
The broken German Army were retreating along 
all the roads and about a day's march ahead of 
the Company. They remained in the little Lux- 



104 THE READING MILITIA 

embourg village until December 1st, wben tbey 
moved on fifteen kilometers to Fishbaeb, and 
the next day, twenty-four kilometers to Beau- 
fort. 

On December 3d the Company again took up 
its line of march. Just outside of the village of 
Bollendorf they came upon the black and white 
striped frontier posts with the arrogant Prussian 
eagle glaring defiance from the top. The moment 
of which they had so often dreamed and spoken 
had come at last; they were crossing the Ger- 
man border. That night the Company rested at 
Peffingen. 

As soon as they crossed the border, the march- 
ing columns were put again upon a war footing, 
with advance guards and vedettes. The populace 
were outwardly friendly, but no chances were 
taken. The men were ordered to carry their 
automatic pistols at all times. The machine guns 
were kept ready for action and the ammunition 
boxes were never locked. The weather was bad 
with heavy fogs and the roads were in terrible 
condition. The Company moved steadily north- 
ward in long marches through the mountainous 
country, known to the Germans as Die 
Volkanische Eifel (The Volcanic Eifel), 
upon which they had counted as one of 



THE ARMY OF OCCUPATION 105 

their principal lines of defense. The 
men were billeted each night in the houses and 
stables of the primitive villages in which they 
halted. The boys could find no complaint as to 
their reception. The inhabitants did everything 
in their power to make them comfortable. The 
tired Company reached the village of Nie- 
deradenau on the 9th of December and remained 
there until the 14th. 

On the 11th they were formed in a neighbor- 
ing field to witness the awarding of the Medals 
of War to such of the battalion as had earned 
them. Private Willis P. Snyder, who had dis- 
tinguished himself on the Champagne front, was 
to have been among the recipients, but was in 
the hospital at the time; the award was made 
at a later period. 

The Company had now reached the Head- 
quarters of the River Ahr, beloved of tourists, 
and were to follow its beautiful valley down to 
the Rhine. The men were delighted with the 
vine-clad hills and interested in the beautiful 
villas and hotels which they saw. Passing very 
close to the source of the famous ApoUinaris 
Spring, they marched to Ahrweiler and reached 
Bodendorf late in the afternoon. Beneath them 
was the broad yellow flood of the Rhine, flow- 



106 THE READING MILITIA 

ing between low, vine-clad banks. The goal of 
which they had spoken and sung had been at- 
tained. 

The months which the Company spent on the 
Rhine were on the whole pleasant ones. Dis- 
cipline was comparatively light, except in the 
critical days when it was thought that the Ger- 
mans might reject the peace terms offered them. 
At that time the Company was again put on a 
war schedule and prepared to take its part in 
the threatened invasion. Happily, the crisis 
passed and the boys were not disturbed in their 
pleasant quarters at Bodendorf. The mornings 
were usually devoted to drill and target prac- 
tice. In the afternoon there were a variety of 
athletic events. Most of the men were billeted 
with private families in the villages and the ar- 
rangement proved eminently satisfactory. The 
officers were fairly liberal with passes to the 
neighboring villages and to Coblentz and 
Cologne. Some of the boys took excursions on 
the Rhine steamers as far up the river as Mainz 
in the French zone of occupation. 

On January 5th, to the intense delight of the 
organization, Captain Brooks returned to his 
command. Lieutenant Shelledy reported back 
on January 8th. The Hotchkiss guns which the 



THE ARMY OF OCCUPATION 107 

boys had been using up to this time were re- 
placed by the new Browning gun and the lads 
instructed in its use. 

Sunday, the 16th of March, was a memorable 
day. The entire Forty-second Division was as- 
sembled at Kripp for inspection by the Com- 
mander-in-Chief, General Pershing, who dis- 
mounted and reviewed each individual unit, the 
regimental bands furnishing music the while. 
"Black Jack" Pershing, as the doughboys loved 
to know him, inspected each unit of the entire 
division on foot. After this ceremony, the huge 
division, in column squads, passed in review be- 
fore the General and his Staff. 

For many weeks, rumors of departure had 

been flying, but it was not until April 9th that 

the Company actually turned its back on the 

noble river they had come to know so well and 

entrained in American Pullman cars, forty-five 

men to a car, for their first lap of the journey 

towards home. They traveled via Metz, Verdun 

and Chartres, arriving at Brest at seven in the 

evening. "Gee! what a shout," writes one of the 

boys, "when we saw the American liners lying 

out in the roadstead." The Company were given 

quarters in the famous camp at Pontanezen, 

where they remained until April 15th. They 



108 THE READING MILITIA 

then marched to the docks and embarked next 
day on the S. S. "Victoria," a comfortable boat, 
but very much overcrowded. 

There is little more to narrate of the career 
of Company D. After an uneventful voyage they 
arrived at Boston on April 28th and began a 
triumphal progress to Camp Devens, in Massa- 
chusetts, which they reached that afternoon. 
Here they were met by a reception committee 
sent on from Reading. A trying week ensued, 
during which the boys controlled their impa- 
tience as best they might. At last, on May 4th, 
they left Camp Devens and entrained for Camp 
Dix, New Jersey, which they reached at 10:30 
in the evening. On the afternoon of May 8th 
they left Camp Dix, arriving at Reading about 
4:30. As they detrained from the same station 
which they had left twenty-one months before, 
they were greeted by the clanging of bells and 
the shrieks of whistles. The entire city was 
waiting to receive them. A frenzied tide of ap- 
preciating fellow-citizens bore them through the 
streets to the Armory, where, with appropriate 
ceremonies they were finally dismissed. 

In all, three hundred and eighteen men had 
passed through the Company rolls. Of the one 
hundred and twenty- two Berks lads who had 



THE ARMY OF OCCUPATION 109 

marched up the hill to the Outer Station on that 
hot August afternoon in 1917, there remained 
only forty-nine. Some had been exchanged to 
other detachments. Thirty-four had come back 
home, wounded or gassed. And the sons of 
thirteen Reading mothers would never return 
again, but were lying beneath the soil of that 
fair land which they had fought to save. 



PART II 



THE CAREER OF COMPANY A 




Later known as 

Company B 



108th Machine Gun Battalion 

Twenty-eighth Division 
American Expeditionary Force 



CHAPTER I 
The Training Camp 

COMPANY A is the senior detachment of 
the Reading militia. Its members love to 
boast that they are the successors of the 
venerable Reading - Artillerists and that their 
organization has had a continuous existence 
since March 23d, 1794. The Company served 
creditably on the Mexican border, under the 
leadership of Captain J. Lewis Lengel. They 
were mobilized on Sunday, July 16th, 1918, at 
nine o'clock in the morning. The same period 
of forty days' drill and practice hikes, which 
has been noted in the training of Company I, 
was ended by the order of departure for August 
20th. It has previously been stated that on the 
18th of August, Captain Charles G. Miller, of 
Company I, was transferred to Company A, and 
Captain Edward V. Kestner, of Company A, was 
placed in the leadership of Company I. At three 
o'clock on the afternoon of August 20th, escorted 
by a dense throng of well-wishers, the Company 
left their Armory for a short parade through 
the principal streets and entrained at the outer 
P. & R. station. 



113 



114 THE READING MILITIA 

The men numbered at this time one hundred 
and thirty-three, whose average age was a little 
under twenty-one years. One hundred and three 
were from Reading and the remainder from 
rural Berks. They were commanded by Captain 
Charles G. Miller, First Lieutenant Irwin E. 
Seaman and Second Lieutenant James M. Sny- 
der. 

After a journey of thirty-six hours they 
reached the great training ground at Camp Han- 
cock, near Augusta, Georgia. No preparations 
had been made for their reception and the Com- 
pany slept on the ground the first night. They 
were then assigned to the location, which they 
maintained with some changes, until September 
16th. Afterwards they were moved to a new 
location on Pennsylvania Avenue, which they 
kept until the date of their departure overseas. 
The Twenty-eighth Division, which was pecu- 
liarly a Pennsylvania and a National Guard Di- 
vision, was in process of formation at this time. 
It was commanded at first by Major-General T. 
C. Clement, of Sunbury, who later was succeeded 
by Major-General Charles C. Muir. Captain 
Francis Wilson, who came from the officers' 
training camp at Plattsburg, was assigned to the 
Company as an additional officer shortly after 



THE TRAINING CAMP 115 

Company A arrived in camp. The Company 
underwent the usual strenuous course provided 
in the American training camps. After re- 
arrangement, they were chosen as a Machine Gun 
Detachment and underwent intensive training 
under English instructors. Eight men formed a 
squad and to each squad was assigned one ma- 
chine gun. The exigencies of our Ordnance De- 
partment were such that few actual machine 
guns were available. Men were drilled with 
wooden guns, except that the non-commissioned 
officers were given some schooling with real 
weapons. Conditions were very chaotic during 
the first few weeks at the training camp and it 
was not known to which battalion the Reading 
boys would finally be joined. 

On September 26th, to the great disappoint- 
ment of the Reading soldiers, came a general 
order, transferring one hundred and twenty-five 
men to the One Hundred and Ninth Regiment, 
which had formerly been the First Regiment of 
Philadelphia. The men realized that it was their 
soldierly duty to go where they were sent. Most 
of them, however, had been recruited with the 
understanding that they were to serve in a pecu- 
liarly Reading Contingent, amongst their friends 
and neighbors. The news of this contemplated 



116 THE READING MILITIA 

action found its way to the city of Reading, 
where there was a widespread feeling of discon- 
tent over this summary breaking up of a detach- 
ment which had served as an individual unit 
since the days of the Revolution. This feeling 
crystalized in the Citizens' Meeting in which a 
committee of three, Robert G. Bushong, Esq., 
John F. Ancona and George Wynkoop, Jr., were 
appointed to secure, if possible, an amelioration 
of the order. The Committee called at the War 
Office and also interested Congressman Arthur 
G. Dewalt in the matter. Their protestations 
evidently had some effect, as the execution of 
the order was postponed for ten days. In the 
end, and as of October 17th, the Company was 
formally reorganized as the Second Company of 
the One Hundred and Eighth Machine Gun Bat- 
talion. It was later known as Company B. 
Seventy-nine of the original Reading boys stayed 
with the Company. The remainder were scat- 
tered about among various contingents and their 
places taken by men from the One Hundred and 
Ninth Infantry, which had been part of the Thir- 
teenth Regiment of the National Guard of Penn- 
sylvania. Lieutenant Seaman, who had left 
Reading with the Company was honorably dis- 
charged under medical certificate. Second Lieu- 
tenant Snyder was made First Lieutenant and 



THE TRAINING CAMP 117 

three new Second Lieutenants, Bellou, Howard 
and Frederick, were added to the staff of offi- 
cers. Captain Sanderson Detweiler, of Colum- 
bia, served with the Company for a short while. 
On November 16th, Captain Miller was removed 
from the command and assigned to Company D 
of the One Hundred and Ninth Infantry. He 
was succeeded by Captain Laurence H. Watres, 
an attorney from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who 
had received his training in the Thirteenth Regi- 
ment of Pennsylvania National Guards. First 
Lieutenant William P. Hayes joined the Com- 
pany at this time. Major R. M. Vail assumed 
command of the One Hundred and Eighth Bat- 
talion on November 1st. Two officers of the 
British Mission, Sergeant Drieballs and Captain 
Pinnell were assigned to the Battalion as instruc- 
tors in machine gunnery. The reorganized Com- 
pany remained at Camp Hancock for six tedious 
months. 

There is little to relate of the stereotyped rou- 
tine of the camp. The boys trained faithfully 
and well. Their letters and diaries all breathe 
a spirit of impatience that their time of active 
service had been postponed so long. 

"The worst of camp life," writes Sergeant 
Joe Eisenbrown, "is the monotony. We are 



118 THE READING MILITIA 

all of us hoping and praying that we will 
soon be sent to France." 

It was particularly galling to the high-spirited 
Company to know that their old comrades of 
Company I were enduring the shock of actual 
battle in the trenches of Lorraine, while they 
were condemned to the monotonous inactivity 
of camp life. 

Their hour came at last. On April 21st they 
left Camp Hancock and on April 23d arrived 
at the same Camp Upton which had received 
their Reading comrades six months before. On 
May 2d they entrained for Brooklyn and em- 
barked at once from the Bush Terminal on 
board the English ship Anchises. The boys de- 
scribed the ship as ill-kept and very much over- 
crowded. Eighteen hundred troops were on 
board. The food was uncertain and indifferent, 
consisting principally of Australian rabbit. 
After an uneventful voyage of two weeks the 
Company arrived at Liverpool on May 16th. The 
men at once entrained and traversed the length 
of England, arriving at Folkestone on the south- 
ern coast at two o'clock in the morning. The 
boys were under strict military restraint during 
the entire journey; they passed through London 
but had no opportunity to inspect it. That same 
afternoon, about five o'clock, they arrived at 



THE TRAINING CAMP 119 

Dover and were quartered in Rest Camp No. 3, 
in the South Port. It was a nerve-racking loca- 
tion. The great trans-channel ferry for troops 
and ammunition ended here and the town was 
bombed systematically by Zeppelins, aeroplanes 
and raiding torpedo boats from the German base 
at Ostend. 

The next day the Reading Company made the 
dangerous crossing to Calais, escorted by a 
flotilla of torpedo boats. They were well re- 
ceived at an English rest camp, where they re- 
mained for three days. A part of their war 
equipment, including gas masks, was issued to 
them. The boys complained that the rations 
were insufficient and that they had not yet ac- 
quired a taste for the jam and tea with which 
their English comrades plied them. Whilst in 
this camp they were raided by German aero- 
planes. Sergeant Earl Shilling wrote humorously 
to his folks at home concerning the incident. 

"At the first alarm all the French and 
English dug for cellars or bomb shelters. 
Our crowd on the contrary, were so curious 
over their first sight of an enemy aeroplane 
that they rushed out into the open and stood 
gaping at them while the bombs fell. A big 
English Tommy said, 'My eye ! Look at the 
blooming Sammies standing out in an air 
raid. They won't last far at that gait.' " 



120 THE READING MILITIA 

On May 21st the boys marched to an entrain- 
ment point and were borne southward to 
Desveres, where they detrained and marched to 
Henneveux, in the English rear zone. The 
Twenty-eighth Division was billeted in this area 
for about two weeks, where the lads received 
the entire British equipment for use in the field 
and began to train for the first time with real 
machine guns. The gun furnished them was 
the Vickers gun, of English pattern. A detach- 
ment of the Northumberland Fusileers was 
attached to the battalion to assist in training. 

"The English are well enough," wrote 
one of the boys to a Reading newspaper on 
May 20th, "but they do not have any tobacco 
to give us. The supply that we brought 
from home is all gone and now we are pick- 
ing up stumps and even smoking dried 
leaves." 

On May 24th, Captain Watres with Lieuten- 
ants Finley and Boss and six non-commissioned 
officers left for the British machine gun school 
at Le Wast, where they remained until June 8th. 
On May 26th, Lieutenant Finley and Corporals 
Mallatin and Ruddy left for a similar school 
at Camieres. June 3d was made memorable by 
the arrival of the first Reading mail. 



THE TRAINING CAMP 121 

It seems to have been the intention of the 
General Staff to leave the division in this train- 
ing area for a longer period of time. The situa- 
tion, however, became so critical that it was 
necessary to throw all available troops into the 
line. Company B accordingly turned in all of 
its British equipment, except the limbers and 
horses and prepared to leave. They left 
Henneveux about noon and marched to Cam- 
pagne, where they were billeted for the night. 
Resuming their hike, they arrived at Chappelle 
Neuve, "dog-tired," late in the afternoon. 

On June 11th they again took up their march 
and bivouaced that night in a marsh, where 
they were compelled to wait two days for the 
other units of the division to entrain. It was 
here that the Company received its first pay in 
French money. 

On the morning of June 13th they embarked 
on the classic box cars, "Hommes forty, chevaux 
eight," for the journey to the eastward. All 
through the long summer day of June 14th they 
rode to the eastward, passing through the suburbs 
of Paris and in clear sight of the Eifel Tower. 
They detrained at Esbly, the same station which 
was to receive their comrades of Company I 
three weeks later. 



122 THE READING MILITIA 

The men unloaded their guns and equipment 
and marched to trucks which soon started, 
crossed the Marne and moved steadily north- 
ward. For the first time, the awe-struck boys 
beheld the flashes on the northern horizon and 
heard the rumble of heavy artillery at the front. 
Early in the morning they arrived at Nantouillet, 
where they slept until evening and then moved 
on to Thieux, where they bivouaced in a field. 
During the night they were awakened by the 
distant wails of sirens and the thunder of a bar- 
rage of seventy-fives, so continuous as to suggest 
the rattle of a machine gun; the enemy aero- 
planes were raiding Paris. The Company re- 
mained in this place two days and then moved 
on to Mory. They later moved a few kilometers 
to Gresse, where they encamped in the beautiful 
grounds of a fine old chateau. The Germans 
had swept through this country in their first 
drive of August, 1914, but had been ejected after 
the first battle of the Marne before they had 
had the opportunity to do much damage. Lieu- 
tenant Doret of the French Artillery Service was 
assigned to the battalion as Liason Officer. 

The Company started a severe five days of 
training under French instructors. This school- 
ing terminated abruptly on the 23d, when the 
Company marched southward in lorries to La 



THE TRAINING CAMP 123 

Celles, near Montmirail, where a further inten- 
sive period of instruction with the French was 
undergone. Here, for the first time, the boys 
had a range practice with the Hotchkiss gun. 
At this place they were rejoined by Lieutenant 
Shoemacker, Sergeants Lawrence, Schwartz and 
Grauer and Corporals Malatin and Ruddy, who 
returned from machine gun school. Lieutenant 
Finley returned from a similar school at 
Camieres on July 2d. 

The days in this sector were spent in drills, 
practice hikes, instructions in machine gunnery 
and in rehearsing attacks in open order. There 
appears to have been considerable difficulty in 
understanding the instructions, owing to the fact 
that the Company was not sufficiently provided 
with interpreters. 

"The Frogs were willing enough," wrote 
one of the boys at this period, "but for the 
life of us we couldn't understand them. We 
were all glad when Lieutenant Finley and 
his bunch returned from school to teach us 
in English. Every day we can hear overhead 
the sound of the big shells which the Ger- 
mans are sending into Paris from some point 
sixty miles away." 

The division was now in the rear Marne area, 
directly back of Chateau-Thierry. It was the 



124 THE READING MILITIA 

eve of the despairing and gigantic thrust which 
the Germans were to make in July. It also was 
to be their last offensive; they never attacked 
again. Marshal Foch was so admirably served 
by his Intelligence Department that he knew 
the enemy would strike southwest of Chateau- 
Thierry. For this reason he drew in heavy con- 
centrations of French troops and used the com- 
paratively raw Pennsylvania troops to fill the 
gaps thus created. A sprinkling of French de- 
tachments was left with the Americans with the 
idea of instructing and steadying the troops as 
yet untrained in battle. By this disposition the 
American soldiers were within the sphere of 
operation, but not directly on the line of attack. 

For the first time the Reading boys saw the 
pitiful scenes which accompanied the exodus 
of an entire countryside. The peasants from the 
country north of the Marne were fleeing south- 
ward; their household effects piled on high 
wheel carts. There was an electrical tension in 
the air. For some weeks they had been hearing 
the rumble of artillery at the front and now this 
had grown into a menacing roar. The boys no- 
ticed the new gravity of their officers and the 
fact that they were frequently summoned to 
Headquarters for consultation. Everyone knew 



THE TRAINING CAMP 125 

that the great blow was soon to fall. Lieutenant 
Hayes and Corporal Eisenhower went up into 
the front line for observation with the French 
for about four days. A Fourth of July celebra- 
tion had been planned but was never to take 
place. 

At 2 :30 in the morning, of the national holiday, 
to the tune of an intense bombardment, the en- 
tire Company broke camp and moved to Pargny, 
where they were encamped in a wood near a bat- 
tery of heavy French guns, which made the night 
hideous with their continued firing. Lieutenant 
Boss was sent up to the line to locate a position. 
Finally, on July 8th, the Company took up its 
position in the line, on hill No. 208, near Conde- 
en-Brie, about six kilometers southwest of 
Chateau-Thierry. The Third Platoon, under 
Lieutenant Shoemacker, was in position in re- 
serve at Montigny. For five days the boys were 
feverishly busy, digging new emplacements and 
dug-outs. All the guns were carefully placed, so 
that every part of the Brigade front was cov- 
ered. A telephone line was run to the Brigade 
Headquarters at Pargny. The horses which had 
heretofore served to draw the gun carts were 
replaced by mules. It was at this period that 
the Pennsylvania Division first saw action, two 



126 THE READING MILITIA 

platoons of the One Hundred and Eleventh In- 
fantry having participated with the French in 
an assault on hill No. 20. 

On July 9th the Company had its first gas 
alarm. The shrieking of klaxons and hammering 
of tin pans was caught up from trench to trench 
and borne along from the front to the reserve 
trenches three miles away. 

On July 14th one of the French liason officers 
visited the Company and predicted to Lieutenant 
Boss that the Germans would never get across 
the Marne, as the south hank of the river was 
so fortified with machine gun nests and barbed 
wire entanglements as to constitute an impreg- 
nable line of defense. If the officer was sincere 
in this prediction, he was sadly mistaken, as the 
event showed. 

The day of the French National Holiday was 
long and tense. Far to the eastward in the front 
line trenches above Suippes, the Reading boys 
of Company I were undergoing a similar strain. 
No one slept. Occasionally a star shell flared 
up in the sky or a gun sounded from the farther 
shore of the Marne, where the foe was complet- 
ing his preparation. Finally, at 11:30 at night, 
came a ripping roar from miles of French bat- 
teries in the rear. Foch had anticipated the at- 



THE TRAINING CAMP 127 

tack from the foe by exactly an hour. At 12 :30 
the great German offensive began, preceded by 
that famous bombardment which Karl Rosner, 
the war correspondent of the Berlin Lokal 
Anzeiger, described as "unparalleled and ap- 
palling." 

Private Russell Moll, a Windsor street boy, 
describes the tension of waiting for the blow to 
fall. 

"We were over a week on that damned 
hill looking down on Conde-en-Brie'. From 
the excitement all around us we knew a big 
push was coming, but we didn't know when. 
The Boche planes were over us all the time, 
sometimes very low. Every night we dug 
new emplacements and mounted the guns. 
We had every road and high point fully cov- 
ered and were ready to give the Boche hell 
if he came through. It was weary work and 
the boys put away a whole lot of red wine. 
We used to fetch up cheese from the French 
canteens back of Villette and have parties. 
Part of our One Hundred and Ninth outfit 
was sent up into the lines because so many 
of the Frogs wanted to go into Paris for the 
holiday. Well, at midnight on July 14th, the 
show began all right. They threw gas at us 
right away and we never got our masks off 
the whole night. I never heard such a deaf- 



128 THE READING MILITIA 

ening roar. We could see every shell falling 
into Conde and they sure did knock the old 
town to pieces. Then their barrage started 
to creep up the hill. We thought it was all 
over but when they got within fifty yards of 
us they lengthened the range for some lucky 
reason and began to throw the shells back 
of us. We had no shelter but the machine 
gun emplacements and the big fellows were 
falling around us. If the enemy broke 
through, our signal was a light in a house 
at the foot of the hill and we watched for it 
all night. We had to keep rubbing our guns 
all the time as the gas was eating away the 
wood and metal. All next day they were at 
it and we heard that the Germans were over 
the Marne and mauling our Pennsylvania 
boys. Lots of wounded kept coming back. 
Boche aeroplanes flying very low kept com- 
ing for us. Towards evening of the next day 
three came in a bunch. We all ducked and 
I heard the explosion just back of me near 
the kitchen. Private Gerald Manley was 
killed and Lieutenant Hayes, Sergeant Mc- 
Loughlin and Cook Bare, wounded. It was 
a sickening sight. Lieutenant Finley took 
command. A report came that the Germans 
were in St. Aignan to our right. We fired at 
the town for a while, but stopped for fear of 
hitting our own boys." 



THE TRAINING CAMP 129 

So much for the part which the Reading Com- 
pany took in repulsing the Great Attack. How 
the Germans attacked with one hundred and 
seventy thousand men ; how they swarmed across 
the Marne, how the four Companies of Penn- 
sylvania National Guard in the front line were 
cut to pieces and how the attack was finally 
stemmed, is scarcely within the scope of this 
account. 

Company B remained in reserve until July 
18th, when the First Platoon was relieved and 
returned to Montigny, where Lieutenant Finley 
took command of the Second Platoon, which 
took over the position of the First Platoon. First 
Lieutenant Hayes rejoined the Company. The 
men remained in their improvised trenches, still 
under bombardment, until July 20th. The roar 
of artillery had gradually died down and the 
Berks boys realized that the front was moving 
away from them and that the Germans were 
in full retreat. The raw Pennsylvania Division 
had acquitted itself in a heroic manner and 
earned the sincere praises of our critical Allies. 
"The hitherto untrained American 
troops," wrote the acute military observer 
of the London Tribune, "fought like vet- 
erans. Their officers showed unwonted ap- 
titude and military skill." 



130 THE READING MILITIA 

The Division including the Reading boys now 
marched southwest out of the bombarded dis- 
trict to Viffort. The shattered companies were 
reformed and the depleted ranks filled with new- 
comers, good soldiers, but very few of them 
Pennsylvanians. 

On July 24th the march was resumed in a 
westerly direction. Company B crossed the 
Marne at Charly and camped in a woods about 
two kilometers north of the river. The German 
host, stunned by the rapidity of the counter- 
thrust, were in full retreat. Their Kaiser, who 
had watched the battle from Ludendorf's villa 
at Blanc Mont, returned disconsolately to his 
headquarters at Charleville. 

Mangin and Degoutte launched a ferocious 
attack from the Aisne-Ourcq line, which com- 
pelled the German General Staff to direct the 
recrossing of the Marne and to retreat rapidly 
to the northward, destroying as much of their 
material as possible. The roads were blocked 
by a dense swarm of retreating columns and 
supply trains, on which the Allied aviators and 
artillery poured tons of projectiles. The re- 
formed and somewhat rested Twenty-eighth Di- 
vision was thrown upon the trail of the dis- 
comfited enemy. 



THE TRAINING CAMP 131 

On July 27th, the fateful day on which a few 
kilometers to the westward, their comrades of 
old Company I received such punishment. Com- 
pany B marched through Chateau-Thierry and 
struck northward in the direction of heavy can- 
nonading. Even the callous boys were struck 
by the appearance of the shattered town of 
Chateau-Thierry. 

"We all thought of Reading," wrote one 
of them to his home newspaper, "and tried 
to picture Penn street in the condition of 
these streets here. The ruins were awful 
and even house corners were shot away. We 
guessed that the first bombardment must 
have come about meal time, for we could 
see the prepared meals still standing on the 
tables in the ruined houses." 

After a short rest, the march was resumed the 
same evening, through Chartreves, Jaulgonne 
and the beautiful Foret de Fere. In the middle of 
the night they observed to the northward a tre- 
mendous and continued illumination which one 
of the boys compared to a blast at the Keystone 
furnace. No one knew what it was, but they 
were later to learn that it arose from the destruc- 
tion by the Germans of their huge store-houses 
at Fere en Tardenois. The woods were filled 
with the debris of the retreating army. Two of 



132 THE READING MILITIA 

the lads who had strayed a short distance into 
the forest found five German wounded, whom 
they sent into the rear in an ambulance. The 
Company lay for three days in the forest as the 
reserve company of the battalion. They were 
continually under bombardment, both by artil- 
lery and aeroplanes. The Germans' retreat was 
temporarily stayed, owing to the fact that by 
now they had reached their reserve lines on the 
Ourcq. The Berks boys lay about in the forest 
but could get little sleep because of continual 
gas attacks. Corporal Hawk, a Thirteenth street 
lad, was badly gassed and sent to the rear. The 
Forty-second Division was actively engaged to 
the left ; numbers of wounded from that division 
straggled through the lines and were fed at the 
Company kitchen. The forest was full of ma- 
chine gun emplacements erected by the Ger- 
mans, many of them still occupied by their dead 
garrison. The houses and villages had been sys- 
tematically destroyed and the fruit trees hacked 
down. This was a miserable period for the Read- 
ing lads. The men crept close to the trunks of 
the larger trees or dug themselves little shelters 
in which to pass the terrible nights. Meanwhile 
the Fifty-fifth Infantry Brigade just ahead was 
fighting its way through Grimpetts Wood, one 



THE TRAINING CAMP 133 

of the crowning exploits of the war for Penn- 
sylvania troops and one all too insufficiently 
known. 

On August 1st, ahout midnight, an enemy 
aviator made a particularly vicious and success- 
ful raid directly over the woods in which the 
Company was encamped. He dropped six bombs 
which inflicted numerous casualties upon the 
sleeping infantry. The men of Company B 
were aroused to an indescribable confusion and 
spent the night in carrying stretchers and giving 
aid to the wounded. Harry Baureithel was one 
of the boys who passed through this gruesome 
experience. He wrote: 

"In the afternoon a Boche plane was ob- 
served above us for quite a while. We sus- 
pected that he was taking photographs. It 
was easy to mark our position because there 
was a break in the line of woods. We were 
asleep when the crash came and didn't 
know at first that it was an aeroplane. It was 
sickening the way our poor boys were cut 
up. You couldn't light a light, as the 
officers would have shot us if we had, so we 
had to go up around in all the blood and 
smell and collect the wounded as well as we 
could. I needn't tell you no one slept any 
more." 



134 THE READING MILITIA 

By this time the way had been cleared. The 
heroic Keystone boys had driven the enemy 
back on the line of the Vesle. On the night of 
August 3d the Company advanced through 
Roncheres, Cierges and Colounges, names which 
deserve to be immortal in the history of their 
native state, and arrived at a wood near Cohan. 
It had been a hard march through a driving rain ; 
the tired men slept where they stood, leaning 
against wagons or limbers. There was little rest, 
however, and the same afternoon they pressed 
on to the northward to a valley east of the town 
of Chery Chartreuve. They dug in on a hillside 
to the tune of a heavy bombardment and numer- 
ous gas alarms. 

On this march, near the little village of 
Chemery, the Berks boys passed a decorated 
grave at which the French had established a 
military guard of honor. The boys looked curi- 
ously for the inscription and read the name of 
Lieutenant Quentin Roosevelt, who had been 
brought down here by an enemy aeroplane a 
few weeks before and buried by the Germans. 

The entire next day they were hard at work 
upon their dug-outs. All varieties of high ex- 
plosives, shrapnel and gas were hurled on them 
and they must endure for long hours the misery 



THE TRAINING CAMP 135 

and discomfort of the gas masks. The crisis had 
come which was to test their mettle to the utmost. 
The enemy had turned to bay with his back to 
the River Vesle. The drive on Fismes began the 
next day. 



CHAPTER II 

The Fismes Sector 

THE Twenty-eiglith Division had now come 
to be regarded as seasoned troops and had 
well won their name of the Iron Division. 
They were next given, as their objective, the 
town of Fismes, at the junction of the Vesle and 
Ardre rivers. The exhausted Thirty-second and 
Rainbow Divisions were brought out of the front 
line and the Pennsylvanians put in their places. 
The town had occasionally loomed large on the 
pages of history, and it was here that the kings 
of France were wont to rest for the night when 
on their way to be crowned in the neighboring 
cathedral of Rheims. It is an important railroad 
junction on the line which runs from Rheims to 
Soissons, and one of the largest German muni- 
tion depots in the sector. The railroad em- 
bankment was for a time the barrier between 
the contending forces. The Germans were bur- 
rowed into the north side and the Pennsyl- 
vanians into the south slope. The contending 
forces would throw hand grenades and even 
stones at each other over the high emplacement. 
The town lay on the south side of the narrow 
stream. On the north side was the suburb of 



THE FISMES SECTOR 137 

Fismette, destined to see some of the hardest 
fighting of the war and to be entirely wiped out 
in the operation. From their hillside the Read- 
ing boys could see the town and the placid river 
and the heavy German guns crashing from the 
hills on the opposite shore. The valley back 
of the Vesle was the "Death Valley," which was 
to cost the division so dearly. 

August 4th was a glorious and crowded day. 
From their position the boys of Company B 
could see the panorama of the attack unfolding 
before them. The One Hundred and Twelfth 
Pennsylvania Infantry secured a foot-hold in the 
south end of the town. Furious street fighting 
from house to house ensued, the enemy strug- 
gling like trapped wolves. It was a costly ad- 
vance but the gallantry of our soldiers was not 
to be denied and by nightfall the foe had sullenly 
withdrawn across the river, leaving a portion of 
their forces as prisoners to the victorious Ameri- 
cans. 

All through the long hot days of August 6th, 
7th and 8th the Company remained in their 
dug-outs. An enemy aeroplane bombed directly 
behind them. Meanwhile the Americans were 
moving cautiously forward and planting their 
artillery, while the stage was being set for the 



138 THE READING MILITIA 

assault on Fismette. After nightfall of August 
9th the Berks Company left its dug-outs and 
moved slowly to the northward over a road 
which was being violently bombarded. They 
were to support the infantry attack by a harass- 
ing fire into the wooded ravines north of Fismes. 
The boys went forward gallantly to the forward 
slope of a hill, about a kilometer south of Fis- 
mes, where they were heavily shelled. Privates 
Coitti, Graham and Hermes were wounded. 
Company B supported the attack by firing a 
barrage into Fismette, across the river. To the 
First Platoon was assigned the task of clearing 
the woods west of Fismes and firing into a tan- 
nery northwest of the town which was still oc- 
cupied by the enemy. They fired from 3:30 in 
the afternoon until six. A platoon of the in- 
fantry was sent up as support and later a part 
of the Third Platoon joined the Second Platoon. 
It was a harassing day under continual bombard- 
ment and the Company was nearly exhausted by 
evening, when the ration wagon finally came up 
with a hot meal. Private Moran was gassed and 
Sergeants Hancock and Lawrence and Privates 
Hobbs and Flanagan wounded. 

All of the next day the men clung grimly to 
their position under heavy bombardment. The 



THE FISMES SECTOR 139 

kitchen was moved back to a reserve position, 
giving promise of the expected relief which came 
that evening. The Company had scarcely fired 
a shot during the last day and yet it had suf- 
fered severely. Private Reber was killed and 
Privates Franke, Hunter, Mabry, Press, Hag- 
gerty, Jill, Joyce, Marsh and Pittoc were wound- 
ed. Plucky Harry Mabry lost a leg and died in 
the dressing station. It was necessary to reform 
the entire battalion. For four days the exhausted 
men lay in a reserve position north of Dravegny, 
while the Germans, who had command of the 
air, used their advantage to the utmost. Com- 
pany B mounted their guns for anti-aircraft de- 
fense and dug in, as well as possible, against the 
continuous bombardment. 

On August 16th the air attacks were so con- 
tinuous and virulent that two squads were sent 
forward to protect the infantry from low-flying 
enemy planes. In this operation Private Carden 
was gassed and Private Hafer was wounded. 
Lieutenant Potter was detached from the Com- 
pany and became the Battalion Adjutant. The 
Boche artillery was served with unusual ac- 
curacy, their bombardment searching the entire 
valley and hillside in an effort to dislodge the 
stubborn Pennsylvanians. There were several 



140 THE READING MILITIA 

direct hits upon our artillery and one costly hit 
was registered upon a body of infantry near the 
Brigade Headquarters which caused many cas- 
ualties. Meanwhile, the fight for the river cross- 
ing and the penetration of Fismette went slowly 
but steadily on in the face of a stubborn re- 
sistance. The fight in the town was of an un- 
paralleled intensity. Five times it was taken by 
the Americans and five times retaken by the 
Germans. It was now resolved by the Divisional 
Command to attempt a flank movement against 
the left of the German forces entrenched be- 
hind Fismette. Accordingly, on August 19th, the 
Reading Company was ordered ot take a posi- 
tion on the extreme right of the divisional front. 
It was obviously suicidal to march across the 
field, as that section was combed continually by 
the enemy artillery. Consequently the line of 
march was taken in an almost southerly direc- 
tion and the men were temporarily with their 
backs to the line of fighting. 

The platoons marched at fifteen minute in- 
tervals, the mules and limbers being with the 
last platoon. This last platoon and wagon train 
was under the command of Sergeant George I. 
Strawbridge, who had been a reporter on the 
Reading Herald. Strawbridge had served all 



THE FISMES SECTOR 141 

through the Mexican Campaign and was a man 
of unusual intelligence and military aptitude. 
Somewhere in the belated mail, between Chau- 
mont and the Division Headquarters, lay his 
commission as Second Lieutenant, but when it 
arrived, the gallant boy to whom it was ad- 
dressed, was already cold in death. His com- 
rades say that on the fateful day he appeared 
to have a premonition of impending doom. He 
was heard to say that he chafed at the life of a 
machine gunner in the reserve zone and hoped 
that before he died he would one time go over 
the top with charging American infantry. There 
is a rise of ground just before the white road 
dips down into the ruined village of Arcis le 
Ponsart. Here the men came under a fire di- 
rected by German observation balloons, which 
were in full view. The animals became restive, 
and Private Bohn was shot down. Strawbridge 
exposed himself with the intrepidity of the true 
soldier, rallied his command and led them down 
into the village. The Company had reached the 
market place and were in comparative safety 
when a well-directed shell seemed to fall almost 
in their midst. A wall at the side of the Square 
fell over, instantly killing Strawbridge and Pri- 
vate Salesky. Corporal William Lutz, a Birds- 
boro boy, was horribly mangled. His grieving 



142 THE READING MILITIA 

comrades crowded about him, but his only 
thoughts seemed to be of the folks at home. 
"It will be all right," he said. "Don't any of 
you write home about it," and again, "Only don't 
tell my mother." For more than a month his 
comrades speculated as to his fate, not knowing 
that he had died that same night in the field 
hospital. Corporal Watkins had also been killed 
by this ill-omened shell and Privates Dalton, 
Davis and Scardelette grievously wounded. 

The badly shaken Company reformed itself 
and waited for the cover of darkness, when they 
stole up to a stone quarry near the front and 
east of the village Courville. The quarry af- 
forded some shelter from the almost continual 
bombardment, and the Company remained in 
it for nearly two weeks. The place was well 
within the observation of the enemy and it was 
suicide to move out during the day. The kitchen 
had been moved up to a nearby dug-out but 
meals could be served only at night. The days 
passed at this place were incredibly long and 
wearisome. The men worked at their dug-outs, 
cleaned their uniforms and wrote letters. The 
smallest sign of activity was provocative of a 
bombardment. Private Elmer Root was wound- 
ed by a shell fragment while attempting to bring 



THE FISMES SECTOR 143 

up rations. The excessive heat added to the dis- 
comfort of the men in the cramped quarters. 
Watchful enemy aeroplanes were continually 
soaring over the quarry and were shot at by 
the lads whenever it was deemed that they were 
within range. On August 26th they were lucky 
enough to bring down an enemy plane very near 
the dug-outs; the aviators were taken prisoners 
by the French. 

Meanwhile the awful struggle for Fismette 
went on without a pause. The gallant Pennsyl- 
vanians were able to hold the line of the railroad 
embankment but could do little more, while the 
enemy artillery was continually shelling the back 
areas. The German guns from the hilltops over 
the valley poured down their galling fire upon 
the American positions and their snipers and 
machine gunners were so well placed as to make 
the crossing of the river too hazardous for an 
attack in force. The fighting in the streets of 
the town swayed back and forth until August 
28th. On that day the Germans made a major 
attack which swept into and over Fismette, driv- 
ing the Pennsylvania lads back to the river. 
Then and only then did our High Command 
awake to the knowledge that the town could not 
be taken by infantry assault without an ap- 



144 THE READING MILITIA 

palling loss. However, the Allied artillery was 
now up and the gunners went systematically to 
work to level the place. 

By that strange free-masonry which prevails 
in armies, the word was circulated that Company 
B was once more to take its place in the line of 
battle. On August 30th, with the coming of 
darkness, the Company moved stealthily out of 
its shelter and back to the reserve area south 
of Arcis le Ponsart, where the men enjoyed the 
crowning luxury of a bath and received new 
clothing, of which they were badly in need. 
Here, too, they were regaled with chocolate, 
cigarettes and a warm meal, to which they had 
lately been strangers. 

The next night, in a heavy downpour of rain, 
they reluctantly left their agreeable asylum and 
marched back to the quarry. Lieutenant Finley 
was transferred to Company C at this time and 
Lieutenant Evans took his place with the Read- 
ing boys. Captain Watres received orders to 
reconnoitre positions for firing into the town of 
Baslieux, about a kilometer northeast of Fis- 
mettes. A detail which included Lieutenants 
Evans and Boss stole up to the lines and located 
a position in a field to the southwest of the vil- 
lage. They left ammunition in the position 



THE FISMES SECTOR 145 

which they had chosen and then returned to the 
quarry. On the next day came definite orders 
as to the part which tlie boys were to take in 
the impending attack. Replacements were sent 
to take the place of the comrades who had re- 
cently fallen and the entire detachment moved 
forward to strange quarters in a cave southeast 
of Villette. This was a cavern of some dimen- 
sions extending into the hillside. The place was 
ivell known to the Germans who had destroyed 
one of the exits but had somehow failed to block 
the other. It afforded a very welcome refuge 
against the searching bombardment, which was 
continually going on. The men left their guns 
and tripods outside in the woods and crept mto 
the cave which was large enough to shelter sev- 
eral companies. The enterprising "Y" contrived 
to bring up a field picture machine and to give 
a show. Meanwhile the heroic One Hundred 
and Third Engineers had advanced to the river 
and, under most trying circumstances, succeeded 
in placing fourteen frail structures across the 
Vesle. The Berks boys remained in this unusual 
place the entire day of September 3d, the en- 
trance was so carefully watched by the Boche 
sharpshooters that it was impossible to bring up 
food until the evening. 



146 THE READING MILITIA 

On September 4th the men prepared for ac- 
tion under the critical eye of their Captain and 
left their rocky refuge about noon. They crossed 
the famous railroad embankment and then car- 
ried their guns over the river by means of a foot- 
bridge recently constructed by the engineers. 
This crossing was a most perilous maneuver, as 
it was conducted under the observation and bom- 
bardment of the enemy. Once arrived on the 
aorth bank of the Vesle, the boys dug in and 
prepared themselves for the attack of the en- 
suing day. 

The anniversary of September 5th should al- 
ways be commemorated in the City of Reading, 
as it marks a particularly glorious page written 
into the military annals of a martial town. It 
marks also a unique achievement for American 
arms, in that it was probably the only occasion 
on which a Machine Gun Company went ahead 
of infantry in an attack on an entrenched posi- 
tion. It is hard to discover just why this costly 
maneuver was attempted. The officers of Com- 
pany B, upon being questioned upon this point, 
invariably shake their heads or shrug their 
shoulders, maintaining a discreet silence. Be- 
fore the writer lies the letter of Irwin Moyer, 
a Reading boy, who shared in the heroic attack. 



THE FISMES SECTOR 147 

written on powder-stained, yellow paper. It de- 
serves to be perpetuated as an epic of Reading 
valor. 

"The order came from Colonel Ham, 
commanding the One Hundred and Ninth 
Infantry, for the attack to begin at seven 
o'clock. The First Battalion was to lead with 
Company B. When we arrived at the point 
from which the advance was to be made. 
Company D was without any officers to give 
us directions. A Boche plane flying very 
low was directing their artillery fire. At 
seven o'clock we were still without any in- 
structions and so we left the wood and went 
to the job. As soon as we got out of the 
woods they began to shoot at us. Our losses 
were very heavy. We were advancing in 
squad columns. Big Mike Panoski, whom 
we called the Polish giant, made a living 
tripod out of himself and the boys fired the 
gun from his back. Lieutenant Boss was 
just ahead of us and waved his hand to en- 
courage us to come on, when I heard him 
give an awful shriek and fall down. I tried 
to get his first-aid packet open but couldn't 
do it. I saw he was done for, but he kept 
saying he wanted to go on. We left him and 
Sergeant Grauer took his place. Our boys 
were falling fast, as the Boche fire was very 



148 THE READING MILITIA 

accurate. By this time we were up to the 
top of the hill and very near the wire. Ser- 
geants Grauer and Lawrence went forward 
to find openings in the wire. The next 
thing we saw was about fifteen Boche ap- 
pearing on the other side of the wire, hold- 
ing their hands up. Lawrence took them 
prisoners and brought them through the 
fence. Just then Grauer got a shot in the 
stomach, which finished him. By this time 
we had only two guns left out of twelve and 
only sixteen men out of seventy-two, who 
had begun to climb the hill. We were in a 
high wheat field at this point, so we laid 
down and waited for support. We dug holes 
as best we could and lay in that damned 
wheat field for three days. The first two 
days we had no food at all. We lay in our 
holes all day. We didn'tteven fire a shot. 
At night the Boche sharpshooters would 
come up from the other side of the wire and 
pot at us. The first evening, Mr. Barker, 
the Y. M. C. A. man, who sure was a nervy 
cuss, came up with first-aid treatment. He 
crawled through the wire and fixed up the 
one German and some of our own wounded 
who lay there. They were pumping gas at 
us continually and we had our masks on as 
much as we had them off. The first night it 
rained hard and we were a miserable bunch. 



THE FISMES SECTOR 149 

At daylight of the second day we saw a 
wounded man from the One Hundred and 
Ninth Infantry lying on our field and Ray 
Steinacker went out and brought him in. 
Captain Watres was lying in his hole with 
us and on the second day, about eight o'clock 
in the morning, he was wounded and taken 
to the first-aid station. He was the only offi- 
cer we had remaining at that time. Lieuten- 
ant Evans came forward and took his place. 
Lieutenant Shoemacker started to come up 
with us but was wounded for the second time 
and had to give up the attempt. The last 
day, about midnight, they brought up our 
chow, which we sure were glad to get. 

"The next day was the hardest of all. The 
German planes were flying over us all day 
and signalling to their artillery. We were 
about all in when Lieutenant Potter came 
in, just about sunset, and asked us to hold 
on a little longer, saying that the French 
were up and believe me, we all beat it, leav- 
ing the guns where they were. As we went 
through the woods again there was some 
awful bombardment. We beat it back to the 
sand quarry, where we formed the Company 
and waited until daybreak and went 
through Villette with our limbers, following 
up back to a woods near Arcis-le-Ponsart." 



150 THE READING MILITIA 

So much for Corporal Moyer's letter. He who 
will, may read between the lines and interpolate 
a story of confused orders, of incomplete liason, 
of insufficient artillery preparation and of gal- 
lant boys sent unfalteringly to their death be- 
cause someone had blundered. Out from the 
frayed pages stands the vision of the long hillside, 
rising from the river and shimmering in the heat 
of that September day and of the desperate little 
groups of machine gunners advancing in the face 
of a terrible bombardment and then holding 
their position, almost without food or water, by 
sheer pluck, for two galling days. 

It was only a skeleton of a Company which 
assembled itself at dawn in the woods by the 
Vesle. Captain Watres was in the hospital and 
did not again take up active leadership. The 
Company had to mourn an irreparable loss in the 
death of Lieutenant S. H. Boss, a gallant and 
competent officer, who embodied the best tradi- 
tions of the American army. The casualties 
were severe, as was to be expected from the 
nature of the advance. These included Sergeants 
Grauer, Shilling and Hayward, Corporals Phil- 
lip, Howard, Latin, Ruddy, McLoughlin, 
Scherimler, Selinsky, Skulmis, Vincent Smith, 
Stoudt, Stubblebine, Symons, Troy, Watson, 



THE FISMES SECTOR 15 1 

Wayne, Adolph C. Yeager, Moll, Hain, Coe, 
Dutcher, Hahn, Skinner, Thomas, Trout, Harry 
Yeager, Bowers, Guenther and McCloud. 

This heroism was not to go without its reward. 
While the Reading Company was holding its po- 
sition on the hill, their infantry comrades of 
the One Hundred and Ninth, One Hundred and 
Tenth and One Hundred and Eleventh Regi- 
ments had advanced three kilometers across the 
broad plain, leading from the height above the 
Vesle to the Aisne. The eventual result of this 
advance was to sweep the Germans back to the 
Chemin des Dames. The Pennsylvania boys had 
fought their way to the top of the high plateau 
from which they could dimly descry the towers 
of the cathedral of Laon, lying about twenty 
kilometers to the north. The enemy had again 
rallied on a new line of defense on the River 
Aisne. For the Twenty-eighth Division, however, 
there was to be no more fighting in this locality. 
On September 7th they were relieved by the 
French and ordered back to a rest camp for a 
period of recreation, of which they were sadly 
in need. 

The infantry had fought unremittingly, day 
and night, for nearly sixty days and the artillery 
for over a month. Even the taciturn Mangin, 



152 THE READING MILITIA 

usually so sparing in his praise, was moved to 
cite the heroic division. 

"I am proud," wrote he, "to have com- 
manded you during such days and to have 
fought with you for a deliverance of the 
world." 

The Divisional Commander, General Charles 
H. Muir, was equally lavish in his praise. 

"A new division by force of circumstances 
took its place in the front line in one of the 
greatest battles of the greatest war in his- 
tory. The division has acquitted itself in a 
creditable manner. It has stormed and taken 
points that were regarded as proof against 
assault. It has taken numerous prisoners 
from a vaunted Guards Division of the 
enemy. A little more grit and a little more 
effort and the division will have the right 
to look upon itself as an organization of 
veterans." 



CHAPTER III 

The Argonne 

THE brilliant and arduous campaign on the 
Vesle marked the conclusion of the 
Twenty-eighth Division's participation as 
part of a French Corps. The new American 
army was now organized and henceforth the 
division was to fight under American command. 
It appears to have been the plan of the General 
Staff to give the worn division a rest, but the 
crowding events which accompanied the great 
American advance of September, 1918, made 
this impossible. The division was held in re- 
serve at Loopy-le-Chateau, in the back St. Mihiel 
area, where they remained in readiness on the 
glorious day of September 12th, but were not 
needed. Scarcely had the rejoicing over the sig- 
nal success of their comrades subsided, when the 
Divisional Commander received orders, on the 
night of September 15th, to terminate the hard- 
earned rest period and to proceed by stiff night 
marches northward towards the forest of Ar- 
gonne. The Fifty-third Artillery Brigade had 
advanced and taken up its place in the wood 
south of Boureuilles on the night of September 
24th. In the meanwhile, the Infantry and Ma- 



154 THE READING MILITIA 

chine Gun Battalions, with the accompanying 
divisional trains, reached the new front by the 
night of September 25th and lay in reserve posi- 
tion until midnight. 

The decimated Reading Company hiked 
wearily southward all through the long hot day 
of September 10th and reached Ouilly, along 
the River Marne, late in the afternoon. The 
men were utterly exhausted and the officers 
deemed it impossible to move them during the 
whole of the next day. About ten in the evening, 
of September 11th, the tired Company mounted 
on motor lorries and rode the entire night, fol- 
lowing the course of the Marne through Chalons, 
Pagny and Vitry, arriving at Contrison in the 
afternoon, where they received an issue of hard 
rations and then marched about twelve kilo- 
meters to Cheminon le Ville. Here the exhaust- 
ed lads were billeted in barns previously occu- 
pied by French and Italian troops. The kitchen 
outfit had been left behind with the wagon train, 
but the boys improvised a canteen from which 
they supplied themselves with fresh vegetables 
and bread. This was the day on which their old 
comrades of Company I went over the top in 
the van of the Forty-second Division, in the great 
attack of the St. Mihiel. The three days which 
ensued were devoted to rest and a general po- 
licing of billets and equipment. 



THE ARGONNE 155 

On the night of September 16th the Company 
moved out for what was to be the longest and 
hardest hike which they were to make in France. 
New shoes had recently been issued, which added 
Qiaterially to the misery of the march; many 
of the boys were compelled to drop out of the 
line. Early in the morning they arrived at a 
woods near Lisle en Barois, where they rested 
for the balance of the day and sent back trucks 
for their comrades who had fallen out. 

On the next day they were cheered by the ar- 
rival of the wagon train and early in the evening 
they took up their march to the northward. It 
was now apparent that the rest period which 
they had promised themselves and which they 
had so well deserved was to terminate all too 
soon. It is a striking commentary on the morale 
of the detachment that not one of the letters, 
written at this period and which the writer has 
been able to read, breathes the slightest spirit of 
discontent. These boys had been in France 
scarcely four months. They had come out of a 
furnace which would have tested the spirit of the 
most seasoned veterans and yet they were willing 
to take up a new and terrible adventure with 
cheerfulness, even with enthusiasm. 



156 THE READING MILITIA 

They were now at Les Islettes, directly in the 
celebrated Argonne forest. The signs of a major 
operation were everywhere and the men noted 
with pride that for the first time they were to 
fight with a purely American army. All the 
teeming thousands of soldiers — infantry, ar- 
tillery, engineers, supply service, tanks, air serv- 
ice, medical service. High Command and Staff 
were American. What interested the boys to an 
equal degree was the preparation for a belated 
pay, which was distributed to them on September 
19th, and which provoked an orgy in chocolate 
and cigarettes. Many replacements were as- 
signed to the Company during these days of prep- 
aration, including Lieutenant Fred B. Proctor, 
destined to a brief but glorious career, who 
joined the boys at Neuvilly. The men were now 
well within the range of the enemy's heavy ar- 
tillery and it was necessary to dig in for protec- 
tion. Inventory was taken of all the equipment 
and all missing articles were supplied. The lads 
were prepared, as far as possible, for the tre- 
mendous drive which was before them. 

On the great day of September 25th, the Com- 
pany rested all day and cleaned their equipment. 
They were to assist in the infantry attack on 
Boureuilles by direct overhead fire during the 



THE ARGONNE l57 

artillery preparation. One platoon was assigned 
to be a combat liason group with the Thirty-fifth 
Division, composed of Tennessee and Carolina 
National Guard units. To the Brigade Platoon 
were assigned six guns, under the command of 
Lieutenants Potter and Proctor. To the liason 
group were assigned four guns under Lieutenant 
Evans. 

Late that night the Company moved stealthily 
northward to a point east of the road about three 
kilometers north of Neuvilly, where they sep- 
arated. Lieutenant Evans going forward with his 
detachment and the other platoon removing their 
equipment from the carts and setting up their 
guns. There was a tense period of waiting and 
then exactly at eleven o'clock, far away to the 
east, sounded the booming of a signal gun. Im- 
mediately there began the crash of the famous 
"Million Dollar Barrage," of which so much has 
been written. On a flaming front of fifty-four 
miles, from St. Mihiel to the Champagne, over 
three thousand guns were bombarding with the 
intensity of drum fire. When the infantry ad- 
vanced through the fog at half-past five in the 
morning, the first line of German trenches had 
been literally pulverized. The Reading boys per- 
formed their part in this tremendous effort by 



158 THE READING MILITIA 

firing into the towns of Boureilles and Petit- 
Boureilles. About ten o'clock in the morning, 
an excited runner, his head bound in a bloody 
bandage, arrived to state that both towns had 
fallen to the victorious Pennsylvanians. Accord- 
ingly, the two platoons joined again and ad- 
vanced warily to the northward over a part of 
the field of the great battle of Verdun, fought 
in 1916. The ground was so pitted with the 
craters left in that gigantic struggle that the 
Reading boys must continually scramble down 
one side and up another of the enormous shell 
holes. Suddenly they came in full view of the 
historic town of Varennes, nestling in the valley. 
"For all the world," wrote one of the boys, "like 
a big Bernville seen from the hill." Had they 
reflected, they might have remembered that this 
was the town in which the last of the Bourbon 
kings had been taken prisoner, in his flight from 
Paris, at the beginning of the great Revolution. 
The lads, however, seem to have been too utterly 
spent by their harassing night and day to think 
of anything but sleep. They spent that night in 
an abandoned German trench and made ready 
for the advance of the next day. 

Early in the morning the Battalion received 
its orders to move. Company B went directly 



THE ARGONNE 159 

through the wrecked town of Varennes, which 
had been virtually demolished by the shell fire 
from both sides, most of the buildings having 
been cut off at the second story. It was while pass- 
ing through Varennes that the Berks lads got 
their first glimpse of General Pershing, who 
passed them in his automobile going up to the 
front. The Company went forward to a quarry a 
few kilometers north of the town and made ready 
to assist in the infantry attack on Montblainville. 
Four guns, under Lieutenant Proctor, were sent 
to aid in the attack and two squads were sent to 
reinforce Company A in the first line. This was 
a particularly hot corner, as the enemy shelled 
the roads and fields the entire day. The four 
squads which remained in battalion reserve 
busied themselves in bringing up ammunition 
and in distributing the clips. 

On the next day the strongly fortified hamlet 
of Montblainville, on the west bank of Aire, fell 
to the heroic One Hundred and Tenth Regiment. 
A platoon, with Lieutenant Proctor, went on 
with the victorious infantry. The two squads 
which had been assigned to Company A re- 
turned, having been in heated action and hav- 
ing lost Privates Sloane and Zegular. At one 
time General Muir, the Corps Commander, had 



160 THE READING MILITIA 

personally directed their fire. Towards evening 
the reunited Company moved to Montblainville 
and established an ammunition dump there. 

Early in the morning of September 29th the 
reserve platoon went forward under a heavy 
bombardment, to a stone quarry north of Mont- 
blainville, where the battalion P. C. was estab- 
lished. Sergeant Paul Fett, a Ninth street boy, 
was severely wounded and lost an eye while gal- 
lantly exposing himself in bringing up ammuni- 
tion. By this time the American attack had gone 
as far as the celebrated town of Apremont. Here 
ensued the greatest struggle in which the Read- 
ing boys took part during their entire career in 
France. The town was held in force, much as 
Fisme and Fismette had been, and presented 
almost the same problem. The enemy had 
brought up fresh reinforcements and covered 
every approach by concentration of machine 
guns. Apremont had been originally set up by 
General Headquarters as the objective of a two 
days' advance. However, the brains which 
mapped out the campaign had failed to take into 
account the nature of the terrain. That the 
Twenty-eighth Division accomplished the task 
in four days was remarkable. It had only done 
so at a terrific cost. Regiments were down to 



THE ARGONNE 161 

half their original strength and the survivors 
were in a bad state from constant exposure and 
extraordinary physical exertion. After one en- 
gagement at Apremont, Company H of the One 
Hundred and Ninth, buried twenty-four of its 
men, which is the largest loss in killed of any 
company in the Division, in one engagement, 
during the war. 

The Reading boys had scarcely penetrated into 
the town when the enemy laid down a heavy 
barrage, followed by a determined infantry at- 
tack. There was close hand to hand fighting in 
the dark. It was here that Brigadier-General 
Dennis E. Nolan of the General Staff took com- 
mand of the brigade in person and won the 
Distinguished Service Cross by fighting in the 
ranks with the doughboys. A reconnoitering 
body of enemy, who apparently were not aware 
that the Americans were in the town, came down 
the village street almost at the moment that the 
Berks Company, under the command of Lieu- 
tenant Proctor, turned a corner by the church. 
In the melee it was impossible to use the ma- 
chine guns. Lieutenant Proctor had, with de- 
voted courage, gone forward alone to find some 
point of advantage at which a gun could be 
mounted and brought into action. He was in- 



162 THE READING MILITIA 

stantly shot through the lungs. Some of the boys 
carried him to the first-aid station in the rear 
but he died almost instantly. Lieutenant Potter, 
who succeeded him in command, became lost 
in the maze of winding streets and found himself 
confronted by an enemy machine gun position 
near the church. Nothing daunted, he called 
upon the three men serving the gun to surrender 
and took them prisoners. The entire command 
then withdrew from the town and took up a 
position on a hillside to the south. 

Much grateful appreciation is voiced by the 
boys for the work of Cook Dougherty, who had 
managed to establish an improvised kitchen in 
a stone quarry north of Montblainville and stuck 
pluckily to his position, though almost constantly 
under fire. He sent hot food each day to the 
Company on the line all during the period up 
to October 7th. 

The Brigade Commander had planned a 
reconnaissance in force to take place early in 
the morning of October 1st. All of the machine 
guns of the Brigade with one Company of the 
One Hundred and Seventh Divisional Machine 
Gun Battalion, were ordered to take part. Posi- 
tions were assigned north of the town, with di- 
rections to fire into La Forge and Chatel Chierry. 



THE ARGONNE 163 

Strong infantry patrols were to go forward, fol- 
lowing the Aire River on the right. Considerable 
ammunition had been brought in bulk to the 
dump in Apremont. About 3:00 A. M. the re- 
serve platoon moved up from the quarry to the 
town, where they were joined by the Machine 
Gun Company of the One Hundred and Tenth 
Infantry with six guns. Reconnaissance for po- 
sitions was made and the guns were placed along 
hedges in the infantry outpost lines a short dis- 
tance in front of Apremont. Just after the guns 
had been placed and such ammunition as was 
in the boxes brought up, the enemy set down a 
heavy rolling barrage on the town and vicinity. 
The gunners sought what cover there was and 
waited for the barrage to lift. A direct hit was 
made by the enemy on one of the guns, putting 
it out of action. The Germans followed their 
barrage closely and due to the mist and character 
of the terrain they were able to approach within 
a short distance of the town. When the barrage 
lifted the machine gunners took their positions 
and had direct fire at the Germans coming on 
in groups at short range. The gunners were 
without sufficient ammunition for sustained fire 
at the positions but in a short time a clip filling 
party was organized at the P. C. and enough 
ammunition was carried to the positions to keep 



164 THE READING MILITIA 

the guns in action. This attack lasted for three- 
quarters of an hour and ended in the complete 
repulse of the enemy, who suffered severe losses. 
It was one of the rare occasions upon which the 
soldiers were enabled to fire directly upon an ad- 
vancing enemy at point blank range and the op- 
portunity was only afforded because of informa- 
tion given by prisoners taken the day before. 
Several American tanks which were in Apre- 
mont were sent out from the flanks and rolled 
ponderously across the fields, firing on the enemy 
with machine guns and one-pounders at close 
range. A direct hit was made on one of the tanks 
by a German "77" which set it on fire. Privates 
Bea and Stevenson were gassed during this en- 
gagement. 

The Company maintained its position during 
the night of October 2d, amid continual bom- 
bardment from our own and the enemy guns. 
In the morning Lieutenant Evans took command 
of the Second Platoon, crossing the Aire River 
under a heavy shell fire and went forward along 
the right bank about a kilometer, where he took 
a favorable position and assisted in clearing a 
woods which was infested by the German sharp- 
shooters. The platoon remained here through 
the entire day of October 4th, keeping up a 



THE ARGONNE 165 

harassing fire upon the enemy territory which 
lay in front of the One Hundred and Ninth In- 
fantry. Meanwhile, the First Platoon maintained 
its position in front of Apremont and fired dur- 
ing the entire day into the wooded area near 
Chatel Chierry. In some places their only target 
was the flash from the enemy guns. On the 
morning of October 5th they also crossed the 
Aire and advanced two kilometers to the north- 
ward, taking up a position in a trench about 
three hundred meters from the Second Platoon. 
It was hot work the entire time and the Company 
suffered many casualties, including Privates 
Dunn, Gray, Frank, Wright and Hawk. All of 
this firing was prefatory to the infantry attack 
upon Chatel Chierry and the ridge to the north 
of the town. 

This attack occurred early in the morning of 
October 7th, preceded by a heavy barrage. A 
terrific struggle ensued, for the enemy was 
strongly fortified in the houses and narrow 
streets of the little town and fought desperately. 
The Pennsylvanians, however, were not to be 
denied and penetrated the town at all points. 
Soon came an order for the Berks Company to 
proceed into the streets which presented a scene 
of horrible havoc and carnage. 



166 THE READING MILITIA 

To reach the village it was necessary to re- 
cross the Aire, which, though narrow, was quite 
deep at this point. It was a most critical move- 
ment and was conducted with splendid spirit and 
success. The men waded into the stream, hold- 
ing their equipment as well as they could above 
their heads. In spite of all their precautions 
they ruined nearly all of their ammunition and 
could not have taken part in any attack that day 
without first being supplied with new cartridges. 
This spectacular crossing of the Aire probably 
gave rise to the accounts published in the Read- 
ing newspapers, which pictured the Company 
crossing the Marne under shell fire. In the first 
place, the Marne, a river of about the size of 
the Schuylkill in its upper reaches, is not to be 
waded with impunity and in the second place, 
when the Reading boys crossed the Marne, the 
Germans had retired from the north bank and 
they were in no more real danger than if they 
had been crossing the Penn street bridge. There 
is so much real glory attached to the career of 
old Company A that there is no need to en- 
croach upon the realm of imagination. 

The bedraggled Company assembled in the 
town late in the afternoon and was soon ordered 
to report to the Second Battalion of the One 



THE ARGONNE 167 

Hundred and Ninth Infantry, which was some 
distance away. It was quite dark when the march 
commenced and the Company was guided 
through the dense forest in single file and event- 
ually arrived at the P. C. of the One Hundred 
and Ninth Infantry, where the men got a much- 
needed rest in some German dug-outs. Their 
casualties for the day included Sergeant White, 
who had been badly gassed; Corporal Eisen- 
hower and Privates Clayton, Price, Shuker, Sny- 
der, Mill and Trask. 

It was the understanding of the officers that 
the Company was to take a part in an attack the 
next morning, and the forward movement had 
actually begun when a counter order was received 
ordering the units back. Indeed, the exhausted 
Division was bordering on collapse and was in 
no shape for any further advance. The men had 
had thirteen days of the most arduous fighting 
against some of the best troops in the German 
army. Their losses had been severe and it was 
deemed absolutely necessary that they be moved 
temporarily into a rest area. 



168 THE READING MILITIA 



"The work of this division in the Argonne 
offensive," wrote Lieutenant-General Bui- 
lard, the Commander of the Second Army, 
"is too well known for me to recount at 
length, but such names as Varennes, Ar- 
gonne forest, Apremont, Chatel Chierry and 
Montblainville are written in history after 
the name of the Twenty-eighth Division." 



CHAPTER IV 
The Projected Attack on Metz 

EARLY in the morning of October 9th, word 
was received that the division was to be 
relieved, its place being taken by the fresh 
Eighty-second Division. The worn out Reading 
lads returned to their wagon train, north of 
Varennes. Next day they marched to the rear, 
passing through Varennes and NeuviUy and en- 
trained late that night for an all-night ride in 
the direction of Metz. At ten o'clock on the next 
day the trucks stopped at an encampment north 
of Menil le Tour, directly on the training ground 
of the first American contingents in 1917, where 
the men were enabled to get a much-needed six 
days rest, punctuated by drills, baths and the 
cleaning of equipment. They received fifty-six 
replacements to make up for their severe losses 
in the Argonne. Lieutenant Potter, who had 
been gassed in the forest but had pluckily stuck 
to his post, was admitted to the hospital and 
Lieutenant Evans took command of the Com- 
pany. Lieutenant Turner from Company A was 
assigned to the detachment at this time. It was 
during this period that the Fifty-third Artillery 
Brigade was detached from the Twenty-eighth 



170 THE READING MILITIA 

Division and sent across the entire breadth of 
France to take part in the fighting in western 
Belgium. The remainder of the division, includ- 
ing the Reading soldiers, was assigned to the 
Thiacourt sector in front of Metz, with its Divi- 
sional Headquarters at Houdicourt. It was now 
a part of the newly formed Second American 
Army, which was intended to execute an en- 
circling move and to have enveloped the de- 
fenses of Metz for the first great invasion of 
German territory. The division took over its 
sector of the front on October 16th. 

The rested Reading Company moved up 
towards the lines to Noviant on the afternoon of 
October 17th. They were well within range of 
the outlying forts of the great stronghold of 
Metz. From the high points they could see the 
steeple of the famous cathedral, and when the 
wind was right the sound of church bells in the 
town came plainly to their ears. For ten days 
the Company remained in this area, the time 
being devoted to baseball and drilling on an 
improvised machine gun range. A major attack 
on the same gigantic scale as those of St. Mihiel 
and the Argonne was in preparation, intended to 
be launched about the middle of November. On 
October 27th definite orders arrived for the ma- 



THE PROJECTED ATTACK ON METZ 171 

chine gunners to move up and take a place in the 
line then held by the French. Lieutenant Evans 
and some of the non-commissioned officers went 
forward to reconnoitre the positions. The ex- 
pectant Company waited all day for the trucks 
to move, but the order was postponed. Finally, 
on the night of October 28th, the men moved 
up to a position at Hassavant Farm and took 
over a position from the French. The wagon 
train stopped in Houdicourt in German billets. 
The boys placed their guns and worked hard to 
improve the emplacements turned over to them 
by their allies. They were under continual and 
heavy bombardment and had to be continually 
on the watch for gas attacks. On October 31st 
Sergeants Moran and eight privates were badly 
gassed by a particularly insidious attack. Ser- 
geant Flanagan and his detail took over the po- 
sition of the men gassed. 

On November 6th the Company rolled packs 
and waited for a relief which did not arrive until 
the next day, when the One Hundred and Tenth 
Machine Gun Company took over their position. 
The Berks boys moved to a woods near Veg- 
neulles, where they enjoyed a three-days' rest, 
after which the order came to move again up to 
the line and support the One Hundred and 
Ninth Infantry which was attacked at Heumont. 



172 THE READING MILITIA 

The memorable day of November lltb found 
the boys dug in at a position about five hundred 
meters north of the ruined town of Heumont. 
Let it be set down without any aspersion to the 
reputation of a gallant company that the boys 
did not manifest their usual ardor in going into 
battle on that day. Rumors had been flying for 
some time and it was tacitly understood that the 
end of the war could not be far off. Neverthe- 
less, at eight o'clock, orders were received for 
Company H, of the One Hundred and Ninth 
Infantry, to attack at 10:40 in the morning. The 
Second Platoon, which up to this time knew 
nothing as to the Armistice, was guided to a 
position in the rear of the attacking Company. 
Their advance was held up by an enemy ma- 
chine gun nest, about one kilometer north of 
Heumont. The platoon drew back about two 
hundred meters to better protected positions in 
a ravine. At 9:45 came the expected announce- 
ment that the attack would not be made, that the 
Armistice was to be signed. The over-joyed pla- 
toon at once took up a defensive position which 
they maintained until the fateful hour. Mean- 
while, the First Platoon, under command of 
Sergeant Flanagan, was in position about two 
hundred meters west of Heumont, in support 



THE PROJECTED ATTACK ON METZ 173 

of Company G, of the One Hundred and Ninth 
Infantry, with orders to support the attack upon 
the heavy entrenched Bois de Bonsil. At 10:40 
they were subjected to heavy artillery fire, which 
ceased at eleven o'clock. The Third Platoon was 
on the left flank of Company G. Unfortunately 
the casualties of the Company in this eleventh 
hour's engagement were severe, including Ser- 
geant McLoughlin, Privates Beaudry, Church- 
man, Hedrick, Landis, Strickle, Thomas and 
Wideman. Brave Mike Panoski, the Polish boy 
who had so distinguished himself in the attack 
at Baslieux, had been shot through the heart at 
the beginning of the bombardment. 

On this great day, Carl Stuber, a Tenth street 
lad, was runner for Brigade Headquarters, and 
he it was who carried the momentous tidings to 
the Reading men in the line. 

"They were in their dug-outs," he relates, 
"getting ready for an advance, which would 
have been a pretty hot affair. I had hardly 
given my message when we were stupefied 
to see crowds of Boche running over to us 
between the mine fields with their hands up 
and yelling like mad. They were crazy for 
cigarettes and chocolate. They had some 
cigars but they were awful. They were big 



174 THE READING MILITIA 

fellows in sloppy uniforms, from the Three 
Hundred and Twenty-eighth Infantry. Some 
of them had been to America and talked 
English and, of course, many of our Reading 
crowd could talk to them in German. They 
said their food had been vile. We had some 
burned rice that our boys wouldn't eat and 
they fell on it like wolves. They showed us 
where the mines were and it kept us busy 
for two days exploding them. This getting 
together lasted for only about an hour when 
our officers stopped it and chased the Ger- 
mans back to their lines. All that night we 
could hear them singing and burning Verey 
lights and bon-fires. There wasn't much 
doing with our crowd as they were all played 
out and wanted sleep." 

The heroic division had well earned its re- 
pose after a long period of sustained fighting. 
They had to mourn the loss of 2,551 killed and 
their wounded numbered 11,429. This was the 
highest percentage of loss for any National 
Guard Division and is exceeded only by the Reg- 
ular Divisions, the First, Second and Third. 
Company B had been badly cut up and had been 
reformed several times. The losses to the Berks 
contingent numbered seven killed and fifty-one 
wounded. 



THE PROJECTED ATTACK ON METZ 1 75 

There is little more to relate of the active ca- 
reer of Company B. Captain Watres, who had 
received his majority in the interval, returned 
shortly after the Armistice, as Battalion Com- 
mander. It was thought for a while that the 
division would form part of the Army of Occu- 
pation and the men were held in readiness for 
an advance upon Metz. They spent eight weary 
weeks in their position at the Hassavant Farm, 
leading a monotonous life in a small town of 
scarcely a dozen houses. Captain Potter kept 
his men as busy as possible in building roads 
and in drills with the machine guns. Several of 
the large hospital buildings were still standing 
and were used by the men as barracks. On Jan- 
uary 5th the division was moved back to the 
Lorraine sector with Divisional Headquarters at 
Columbey la Belle. The Berks Company was 
quartered in the small village of Saulxures les 
Bannes. Another disappointing interval of hope 
and speculation passed for the homesick boys. 
At last, on March 16th, they entrained once more 
and moved westward to the great camp at Le 
Mans in Brittainy, where they remained for six 
weeks and then moved on to the embarkation 
port of St. Nazaire. Here the lads embarked on 
the Peerless, a Standard Oil ship, hastily remod- 



176 THE READING MILITIA 

eled as a transport. The ship proved to be an 
execrable sailer and the lads were seasick nearly 
all the way to the Delaware Capes. They re- 
ceived a wireless, when a day out from Phila- 
delphia, to the effect that the great Jubilee 
Parade of the Twenty-eighth Division was being 
held without them, but seemed to have been too 
much occupied with their own troubles to care 
anything about it. They finally disembarked on 
May 16th and entrained for Camp Dix, New Jer- 
sey, where a week was consumed in the process 
of mustering out. At last, on May 23d, the im- 
patient lads entrained for the last lap of their 
long journey, arriving at Reading on the after- 
noon of May 23d. As they left camp there was 
an affecting scene when the boys filed past Cap- 
tain Potter and each clasped his hand. The 
train moved out and the men joined in a rousing 
cheer for the plucky Captain who had led them 
so faithfully and well. Representatives of the 
Citizens' Patriotic Committee met the men at 
Camp Dix and their progress was heralded 
through the fire alarms in the city of Reading. 
When the train stopped at the Outer Station it 
was in the midst of a dense throng of rejoicing 
fellow-citizens, who led the boys in triumphant 
march through the streets of the city, to the tune 



THE PROJECTED ATTACK ON METZ 177 

of victory bells and amidst the plaudits which 
they had so well earned. Their superior, as an 
indomitable hard-fighting unit, is not to be 
found in the annals of the American Expedi- 
tionary Force, nor, has any National Guard Com- 
pany a more creditable record for continued and 
severe combat. 



CONCLUSION 

SO ended the careers of two bodies of de- 
voted soldiery. A complete record, in- 
volving casualties, replacements and 
orders of the day, as embodied in the official 
records at Washington, would swell this book to 
undue proportions. What is given here purports 
to be a plain, unvarnished recital of the careers 
of old Companies A and I in the Great War. 
The writer, though unattached to either com- 
pany during the war, has had the advantage of 
having been personally over most of the terrain 
covered by the lads in their peregrinations in 
France. He has talked to scores of modest boys, 
recounting in our kindly local accent and in the 
most matter-of-fact way, sacrifices and achieve- 
ments which should ring down the years. He 
has been enabled to read many letters written 
from overseas to relatives and friends. He has 
had the advantage of several excellent diaries, 
in particular, of the very admirable and com- 
plete record kept by Sergeant Smith, the Ulysses 
of Company I. Spontaneous communications of 
this sort have a grip and a thrill which is not to 
be attained by any form of literary invention. 



180 THE READING MILITIA 

Out from their frayed pages mount the crowding 
visions of glorious days; of Corporal Smith fight- 
ing his spitting gun to the last when the gray 
hordes overwhelmed him at Suippes; of Snyder 
carrying his wounded comrade back through the 
traverse trench with the foe at his very heels; 
of Strawbridge steadfastly leading his command 
over the bombarded road down to the village 
where his doom awaited him; of Grauer taking 
command of a forlorn hope when all his superi- 
ors had been shot down and advancing up a 
bullet-sprayed hill to meet his death at the top. 

"Fame," wrote the poet, "is the fragrance of 
heroic deeds; of flowers of chivalry and not of 
weeds." If, by this recital, the writer shall 
have been enabled in some small measure to en- 
large the appreciation of his fellow-townsmen 
for the suffering and achievements of the sons 
of Reading in the greatest of all wars, he will 
be well content of his task. 



COMPANY I— DEAD 

Sergt. Paul H. Ludwig, 433 Moss. 
Corp. William F. Gehring, Reading. 
Corp. Floyd Bowers, 1416 N. Tenth. 
Corp. Herbert Yeich, 943 N. Eleventh. 
Private Adolph Kissinger, Glenside. 
Private Ross Overdorf, 114 N. Seventh. 
Private Achileffs Karausta, 441 Little Maple. 
Private Nelson A. Bowers, 1416 N. Tenth. 
Private Floyd Heckman, 202 S. Ninth. 
Private Walter Briel, 1138 Green. 
Private Alvin P. Epler, Mohnton. 
Private Charles Arnold, 1043 Elm. 
Private Milton H. Folk, 1716 N. Front. 




COMPANY A— DEAD 

Sergt. George I. Strawbridge, 344 S. Fifth. 
Sergt. George C. Wyncoop, 108 Spring. 
Sergt. George E. Shade, 901 Schuylkill ave. 
Corp. Leroy W. Correll, 727 Locust. 
Corp. Frank G. Goodman, 512 S. Fifth. 
Private Henry C. Rothenberger, 421 Wunder. 
Private Charles Reber, Shillington. 
Private William J. Lutz, Birdsboro. 
Private Shipton G. Grauer, 433 Woodward. 
Private Harry Mabry, Reading. 
Private Nevin E. Miller, 409 W. Windsor. 
Private William A. Giles, 929 N. Eighth. 
Private Benjamin Moyer, 425 Moss. 
Private Arthur Thomas, 746 N. Eighth. 
Private Adam Behm, Mohnton. 
Private Daniel Austin, 259 Jefferson. 
Private Earl Hauck, 1354 Green. 
Private George A. Gilliams, 901 Schuylkill ave. 
Private John Loughlin, 422 Chestnut. 
Private Paul Hollinger, 628 N. Thirteenth. 
Private James G. H. Peiffer, 508 Mulberry. 




COMPANY I— WOUNDED 

Sergt. Clarence E. Bingaman, 680 Tulpehocken. 
Sergt. George A. Gring, 325 W. Greenwich. 
Corp. Robert E. Muntz, 335 Locust. 
Private George K. Sharp, 84114 Penn. 
Private John E. Tobias, 212 S. Tenth. 
Private Lloyd R. Burkey, 725 Pear. 
Private James Troutman, 571 Douglass. 
Private John Rinker, 744 Penn. 
Private George H. Simmonds, 537 Spring. 
Private Willis P. Snyder, 503 S. Twelfth, D.S.C. 
Private Alvin P. Epler, Mohnton. 
Private Frank G. Reilly, 1636 Cotton. 
Private Milton Shuker, 131 Orange. 
Private George Kochel, 1448 Muhlenberg. 
Private Clarence W. Stubblebine, 1000 N. Sixth. 
Private Robert W. Shappell, 620 Moss. 
Private Albert Boldt, 210 S. Twelfth. 
Private John C. Wessner, 826^4 Bingaman. 
Private Earl W. Bennethum,269 S. Seventeenth. 
Private James Oudath, 334 Buttonwood. 



COMPANY A— WOUNDED 

Lieut. James M. Snyder, 436 N. Twelfth, D. S. C. 
Lieut. Walter B. Ravel, 1257 Eckert ave. 
Sergt. Albert R. Miller, 1396 Perkiomen ave. 
Sergt. Earl L. Shilling, Shillington. 
Sergt. Harold Miller, 548 North Eighth. 
Sergt. Paul W. Fett, 35% N. Ninth. 
Sergt. Samuel E. Crammer, 423 N. Second. 
Sergt. Lehman Bright, Bernville. 
Sergt. Howard S. Smith, 732 Birch. 
Mess Sergt. William H. Bare, Shillington. 
Corp. Jacob Newster, 538 South Sixth. 
Corp. Philip K. Howard, Mt. Penn. 
Corp. Norman E. Baer, 935 Windsor. 
Corp. Stanley W. Schweimler, 158 W. Windsor. 
Corp. John S. Lash, 320 Wood. 
Corp. Lester R. Spickler, 732 Birch. 
Corp. Charles A. Hawk, 432 N. Thirteenth. 
Corp. James E. Snyder, 919 Douglass. 
Private William S. McKeever, 521 Pike. 
Private Russell H. Moll, 135 West Windsor. 
Private Charles F. Lash, 320 Wood. 
Private Antonio Diguardi, Millmont. 
Private William A. Mitchell, 100 Yarnell. 
Private Antonia Morro, 1335 Moss. 
Private John W. Grim, 201 North Tenth. 
Private Walter L. Eshbaugh, 439 Pearl. 



COMPANY -A"— WOUNDED 185 

Private Harry Yeager, 649 Tulpehocken. 
Private Elmer Root, 142 S. Twelfth. 
Private Ammon R. Wayne, 1163 Mulberry. 
Private Robert Fisher, 1355 Cotton. 
Private Albert F. Shade, 422 Wood. 
Private Charles U. Stoudt, 315 Cherry. 
Private Raymond R. Weiser, 422 Spruce. 
Private Raymond D. Barter, 1218 Green. 
Private Frank Hahn, 869 N. Eighth. 
Private George C. Wright, 1340 Church. 
Private William E. Williams, 350 Tulpehocken. 
Private Harvey E. Noll, 206 Chestnut. 
Private Raymond N. Weiser, 422 Spruce. 
Private Clyde Rippert, 439 Pearl. 
Private Ammon R. Wayne, 352 Schuylkill ave. 

Private Arthur M. Lowrey, 418 Pine. 

Private Harry W. Schaeffer, 420 Orange. 

Private Charles J. Marsh, 1311 Buttonwood. 

Private Clayton Stubbeline, 342 Tulpehocken. 

Private Carl F. Stuber, 7471/2 N. Tenth. 

Private Charles K. Simmons, 335 Chestnut. 

Private John J. Schucker, 131 Orange. 

Private Henry A. Gehris, 725 Birch. 

Private Earl C. Burkhart, Stony Creek Mills. 

Private Earl R. Bohn, 134 N. Second. 



COMPANY "I" ROSTER 

The roster of Company 1. follows: 
Captain Edwin V. Kestner, 734 N. 13th St., Reading, Pa. 
First Lieut. Victor Garman, 25 N. 5th St., Lebanon, Pa. 
First Lieut. Henry M. Gross, 1517 N. Front St., Harris- 
burg, Pa. 
Second Lieut. Glenn A. Ross, Waynesburg, Pa. 
Second Lieut. James W. Mackall, Beaver, Pa. 
Second Lieut. David N. Trapnell, 242 W. Walnut St., 

Lancaster, Pa. 
Second Lieut. Alfred O. Arseneau, 3510 Woodland Ave., 

Duluth, Minn. 
Agnew, Harry, Pvt., Washington, Pa. 
fAlexander, Nicholas, Pvt., Clarksburg, West Va. 

Ambler, J. Herbert, 817 Schuylkill Ave., Reading, Pa. 
♦Arnold, Charles, Pvt., 1043 Elm St., Reading, Pa. 
fAustin, Daniel, Pvt., 259 Jefferson St., Reading, Pa. 
Baer, Irvin R., Cook, 936 Mulberry St., Reading, Pa. 
Bard, Harry, Pvt., 540 N. 13th St., Reading, Pa. 
Barth, William F., Pvt., 711 Windsor St., Reading, Pa. 
Bennethum, Earl, Pvt., first class, 269 S. 17th St., Reading, 

Pa. 
Behm, Adam, Sgt., Mohnton, Pa. 

Benson, Leon, Sgt., 2713 N. 11th St., Philadelphia, Pa. 
Bingaman, Clarence E., Sgt., 680 Tulpehocken St., Read- 
ing, Pa. 
Bixler, Hammond, Pvt., 822 Court St., Reading, Pa. 
*Bowers, Nelson, Pvt., first class, 1416 N. 10th St., Reading, 

Pa. 
tBoldt, Albert, Pvt., first class, 210 S. 12th St., Reading, Pa. 



♦Killed. 

tWounded. 

JDeath due to sickness. 



188 COMPANY "F ROSTER 

Boyd, Douglass B., Sgt., 308 Main St., Monongahela, Pa. 

Bordner, Paul C, Corp., 659 Gordon St., Reading, Pa. 

Boyer, William E., Pvt., 1630 Muhlenberg St., Reading, Pa. 
♦Bowers, Floyd, Corp., 1416 N. 10th St., Reading, Pa. 
*BrieI, Walter, Pvt., first class, 1138 Green St., Reading, Pa. 
tBurkey, Lloyd, Pvt., 725 Pear St., Reading, Pa. 

Castner, Bryan, Pvt., 261 S. 17th St., Reading, Pa. 

Conner, Robert, Mess Sgt., 101 Douglass St., Reading, Pa. 

Correll, LeRoy W., Sgt., 727 Locust St., Reading, Pa. 

Collins, Thomas, Pvt., R. F. D. 1, Parkwood, Pa. 

Cunnningham, Clifford, Pvt., 214 E. Washington St., Mt. 
Pleasant, Pa. 

Daniels, Christian, Corp., 738 Pear St., Reading, Pa. 

Daniel, Louis, Pvt., 1481 Front St., Reading, Pa. 
tDaugherty, John F., Pvt., 917 Church St., Indiana, Pa. 

Davis, Miles, Pvt., 757 N. 8th St., ileading. Pa. 

Davis, George, Pvt., P. O. Box 123, Bloomsburg, N. J. 

Dease, Robert P., Sgt., 1116 Cotton St., Reading, Pa. 

Dease, Earl, Pvt., first class, 1116 Cotton St., Reading, Pa. 

DeLong, Charles W., Pvt., first class, 220 W. Elm St., 
Reading, Pa. 

Devine, Joseph V., Sgt., 1108 N. 9th St., Reading, Pa. 

Diefenbach, Arthur, Pvt., 1441 Fairview St., Reading, Pa. 

Dombroski, Martin, Pvt., 622 Pine St., Reading, Pa. 

Dwyer, William J., Pvt., 915 N. 8th St., Reading, Pa. 
fEckenroth, Charles, Pvt., Mohnton, Pa. 
*Epler, Alvin P., Pvt., Mohnton, Pa. 

Faust, Elmer E., Sgt., 114 N. 7th St., Reading, Pa. 
fFerryman, Charles, Mech., Schuylkill Haven, Pa. 

Fix, Harrison, Pvt., 1143 Franklin St., Reading, Pa. 
$Folk, Milton H., Pvt., first class, 1716 N. Front St., Read- 
ing, Pa. 

Fry, Chester D., Corp., 318 Washington St., Reading, Pa. 



COMPANY "I" ROSTER 189 

Fry, Daniel, Pvt., Mohnton, Pa. 

Garis, Harold, Pvt., 519 Bingaman St., Reading, Pa. 
*Gehring, William F., Corp., 308 High St., Hanover, York 
County, Pa. 
Giles, William A., Corp., 929 N. 8th St., Reading, Pa. 
Gillmore, Raymond, Pvt., 131 S. 9th St., Reading, Pa. 
Gilliams, George A., Pvt., 901 Schuylkill Ave., Reading, Pa. 
Good, George E., Pvt., 330 S. 17th St., Reading, Pa. 
Graeff, Harry E., Supply Sgt., 114 N. 7th St., Reading, Pa. 
Gring, George A., Sgt., 325 W. Greenwich St., Reading, Pa. 
tHauck, Earl, Pvt., first class, 1354 Green St., Reading, Pa. 
tHeckman, Floyd, Pvt., first class, 202 S. 9th St., Reading, 
Pa. 
Heckman, James I., Pvt., Kingston, N. J. 
Herring, George, Pvt., 416 S. 11th St., Reading, Pa. 
Herman, John, Pvt., Barren Island via Brooklyn, N. Y., 

New York. 
Heil, Charles, Pvt., 1215 Church St., Reading, Pa. 
*His8inger, Adolph, Pvt., R. F. D. 2, Box 147, Reading, Pa. 
HoUinger, Paul, Pvt., 628 N. 13th St., Reading, Pa. 
Homan, Clarence, Sgt., 1721 Haak St., Reading, Pa. 
Homan, Webster, H. S-, Grill, Pa. 

Hoover, Frank G., Pvt., 150 Clymer St., Reading, Pa. 
Hoster, Reuben, Pvt., Mohnton, Pa. 
Hoster, Howard E., Pvt., Mohnton, Pa. 
Hoster, Clayton, Pvt., Mohnton, Pa. 
Hostetler, Harry, Stable Sgt., 306 S. Diamond St., Mt. 

Pleasant, Pa. 
Hurst, Paul, Pvt., 1320 Buttonwood St., Reading, Pa. 
Hummel, John C, Pvt., first class, Shillington, Pa. 
Hyneman, Arthur, Pvt., 1702 Hill Road, Reading, Pa. 
Jarrette, Ralph C, Sgt., 1424 Cotton St., Reading, Pa. 
Johnston, Earl J., Pvt., 96 Ewing St., Washington, Pa. 



190 COMPANY "I" ROSTER 

*Karausta, AchilefFs, Pvt., 972 Pennsylvania Ave., Tyrone, 
Pa. 

*Keltz, Harry A., Pvt., 323 Fairmont St., Latrobe, Pa. 

Kelly, Alden, Pvt., 303A S. 17th St., Reading, Pa. 

Kissling, Harry, Pvt., Sinking Springs, Pa. 

Klein, William R., Pvt., Mohnton, Pa. 

Klopp, John E., Corp., West Leesport, Pa. 
tKochel, George, Pvt., 1448 Muhlenberg St., Reading, Pa. 

Koehler, Charles, Corp., Reading, Pa. 
fKompa, Anthony, Cook, Reading, Pa. 
*Kotouch, Robert, Pvt., Greensburg, Pa. 

Kramer, Earl, Pvt., 1210 Church St., Reading, Pa. 

Kreider, Russell, Pvt., 638 Penn St., Reading, Pa. 

LaMar, William H., Pvt., 36A S. 10th St., Reading, Pa. 

Lamb, John W., Pvt., 515 Finley St., Monongahela City, Pa. 

Lee, Frederick, Pvt., 712 McKnight St., Reading, Pa 

Leinbach, Harry, Pvt., first class, 1721 Center Ave., Read- 
ing, Pa. 

Leininger, Barton, Pvt., first class. Sinking Springs, Pa. 

Long, John A-, Pvt., Mohnton, Pa. 

Lotz, Earl C, Cook, 1626 Mulberry St., Reading, Pa. 

Loughlin, John, Pvt., 422 Chestnut St., Reading, Pa. 
*Ludwig, Paul H., Sgt., 433 Moss St., Reading, Pa. 

Ludwig, Raymond, Corp., 433 Moss St., Reading, Pa. 

Major, Ross, Bugler, 330 N. 10th St., Reading, Pa. 

Millen, James, Pvt., 718 Chestnut St., Reading, Pa. 

Miller, Nevin E., Pvt., first class, 409 W. Windsor St., 
Reading, Pa. 
tMoore, William B., Sgt., Joanna Furnace, Berks County, 
Pa. 

Moyer, Ben, Pvt., first class, 425 Moss St., Reading, Pa. 
fMuntz, Robert E., Corp., 335 Locust St., Reading, Pa. 

Muthart, John L., Pvt., 640 Minor St., Reading, Pa. 



COMPANY "I" ROSTER l9l 

Noecker, John F., Pvt., 115 High St., Schuylkill Haven, Pa. 
Odage, Christofiur, Pvt., 3 Cedar St., Reading, Pa. 
Ottilo, Alfred, Pvt., Ascoli Piceno, Italy. 
Oudath, James, Pvt., 334 Buttonwood St., Reading, Pa. 
*Overdorf, Ross, Cook, 114 N. 7th St., Reading, Pa. 
Palm, William J., Pvt., first class, Wyomissing, Pa. 
Park, Arthur M., Sgt., 419 Fairmont St., Latrobe, Pa. 
Peiffer, James G. H., Pvt., 208 Mulberry St., Reading, Pa. 
Personette, Charles E., Corp., 1972 Patterson Place, Balti- 
more, Md. 
Queer, Thomas, Sgt., 935 W. Washington St., Mt. Pleasant, 

Pa. 
Rambo, Harold, Pvt., 817 Schuylkill Ave., Reading, Pa. 
Reber, William J., Corp., 1147 Cotton St., Reading, Pa. 
Reifsnyder, Franklin, Pvt., 1030 Spruce St., Reading, Pa. 
Reilly, Frank, Pvt., 1638 Cotton St., Reading, Pa. 
Remza, Anthony W., Pvt., 660 Cotton St., Reading, Pa. 
Rettgers, Tthamar, Sgt., 1041 Elm St., Reading, Pa. 
*Reynolds, Walter S., Pvt., 20th St. and 5th Ave., Beaver 
Falls, Pa. 
Rinker, John, Pvt., 744 Penn St., Reading, Pa. 
Rogers, Robert L., Cook, 138 Plum St., Reading, Pa. 
Sabatucci, Enrico, Pvt., Temple, Pa. 

Savage, Earl W., Pvt., 351 W. Douglass St., Reading, Pa. 
Schaeffer, Irvin L., Cook, 148 Walnut St., Ephrata, Pa. 
Schaufert, Paul R., Pvt., 1008 Franklin St., Reading, Pa. 
Schick, Walter H., Corp., 116 S. 8th St., Reading, Pa. 
Seger, Ward M., Pvt., Derry, Pa. 

Shade, George F., Sgt., 901 Schuylkill Ave., Reading, Pa. 
Shappell, Robert W., Pvt., 620 Moss St., Reading, Pa. 
tSharp, George, Pvt., 841 i Penn St., Reading, Pa. 
tShuker, Wilton, Pvt., 131 Orange St., Reading, Pa. 
Simmonds, George H., Jr., Pvt., first class, 537 Spring St., 
Reading, Pa. 



192 COMPANY "I" ROSTER 

Simpson, Charles M., Pvt., Sidney St., Greensburg, Pa. 

Simon, Cost, Cologne, Greece. 

Smith, Stanley G., Mech., 114 N. 7th St., Reading, Pa. 
tSnyder, Willis P., Pvt., 1237 Cotton St., Reading, Pa. 

Spears, Samuel, Sgt., 706 Commerce St., Shamokin, Pa. 

Stark, Abe., Cook, 1718 Park Place, Brooklyn, N. Y. 
fStauffer, John W., Pvt., R. F. D. 5, Box 102, Greensburg, 
Pa. 

Steely, Harry, Pvt., R. F. D. 3, Sinking Springs, Pa. 

Stief, Lourin, Pvt., Warnersville, Pa. 

Stover, Carson E., Sgt., 144 Washington Ave., Ephrata, Pa. 

Stoudt, Cleveland, Pvt., first class. Sinking Springs, Pa. 
tStubblebine, Clarence W., Pvt., 1418 Mulberry St., Read- 
ing, Pa. 

Swavely, William, Pvt., 410 Orange St., Reading, Pa. 

Thiry, George M., Pvt., 1032 Amity St., Reading, Pa. 

Thomas, Arthur W., Pvt., 746 N. 8th St., Reading, Pa, 

Tlumack, Andrew T., Sgt., R. F. D. 7, Greensburg, Pa. 
tTobias, John E., Pvt., first class, 212 S. 10th St., Reading, 
Pa. 

Tothero, William, Corp., Mohnton, Pa. 
fTroutman, James, Pvt., 571 Douglass St-, Reading, Pa. 

Visner, Walter, Pvt., 421 S. 7th St., Reading, Pa. 

Vogel, William E., Pvt., first class, Mohnton, Pa. 

Wagner, George A., Pvt., 1348 Cotton St., Reading, Pa. 

Walker, Harry R., Bugler, 152 Hamilton St., Reading, Pa. 

Wanner, Louis, Corp., 918 Robeson St., Reading, Pa. 

Waidner, Elmer, Pvt., 564 S. 15th St., Reading, Pa. 
tWentzel, Charles C. D., Pvt., 227 Penn St., Reading, Pa. 
tWertz, John E., Pvt., 1618 Fairview St., Reading, Pa. 

Wessner, John, Pvt., 826| Bingaman St., Reading, Pa. 

Wieand, Grover, Pvt., R. F. D. 1, Reading, Pa. 

Wildermuth, Lewis C, Corp., 432 Laurel St., Reading, Pa. 



COMPANY "I" ROSTER 193 

tWitman, Charles, Pvt., first class, 361 W. Greenwich St., 
Reading, Pa. 

Wynkoop, George, Corp., 108 Spring St., Reading, Pa. 
*Yeich, Herbert, Corp., 943 N. 11th St., Reading, Pa. 
Young, Earl E., Corp., 703 N. 10th St., New Brighton, Pa. 
Young, William F., Pvt., first class, Mohnton, Pa. 



REPLACEMENTS— Officers 

Brooks, Joseph W., Capt., Williams Club, N. Y. City. 

Rowse, Herbert W., First Lieut., 12 Cever St., Plymouth, 
Mass. 

Shelledy, Earl E., First Lieut., Edinburg, Texas. 

Hamlin, Edgar G., Second Lieut. 

Ridenour, John S., First Lieut., 220 East Penn St., Bed- 
ford, Pa. 

Shivers, Edw. D., Second Lieut., Marian, Alabama. 

Pendleton, George, First Lieut., 7 E. 80th St., N. Y. City. 

Rochester, William E., Second Lieut., Ellicott City, Md, 

Jung, William J., First Lieut., 1309 Washington St., Mani- 
towoc, Wisconsin. 

Hupe, Leroy W., Second Lieut. 



REPLACEMENTS — Privates and Non-Commissioned 
Officers 

Ahlm, Oscar, Pvt., Chicago, 111. 
Anderson, George, Pvt. 
tArtz, Leo J., Pvt., Aberdeen, S. D. 

Artz, Matt. Pvt. 
fAshford, Harry, Corp. 
Ashton, William, Sgt., 511 Benton Ave. (North), Helena, 

Montana. 
Askew, Francis, Pvt. 
Barber, Charles J., Pvt. 

Barlow, William H., Pvt., Organsville, Georgia. 
Bowman, Eddie W., Pvt. 
Blackman, Irving, Pvt., New York City, N. Y., 1090 

Simpson St. 
Blank, William F., Pvt., Delavan, Walwarth, Wisconsin. 
Blashfield, Ralph, Pvt., 188 S. Jefferson St., Battle Creek, 
Michigan. 
*Bonacher, John E., Pvt. 
Borglin, Rudolph, Pvt., 229 Harvard St., Cambridge, Mass. 
Boschenien, Frederick, Pvt., Mt. Vernon, N. Y., 112 Pros- 
pect Ave. 
Bothwell, Harold H., Pvt. 
Bouten, Joseph O., Pvt. 
tBrazelli, Primo, Pvt. 
Bremen, John J., Pvt., 370 York St., Jersey City, N. J. 
Bryant, Rufus R., Pvt. 

Buch, Herman, Pvt., 11 E. 98th St., New York City, N. Y. 
tBumgarner, Sim, Pvt., Delight, Arkansas. 
Burracker, August, Pvt. 
Cahill, Joseph M., Pvt. 

tWounded. 
♦Killed. 



196 COMPANY "I" ROSTER 

Camp, Albert J., Pvt. 

Carroll, Thomas J., Pvt., Delight, Arkansas. 

Casale, John, Pvt., Valla Torino, Italy. 

Clair, Harry A., Pvt. 

Cohen, Louis, Pvt. 

Cohl, Davie C, Pvt. 
fConvey, James S., Pvt. 

Cornelius, Edwin H., Pvt. 

Cornish, John H., Pvt., Nathan, Arkansas. 

Daniels, Charles B., Mech., 1552 Dwight St., Holyoke, Mass. 

Degista, Fedelle, Pvt. 

Dowd, James H-, Pvt. 

Dubitsky, Hernan, Pvt., 24 Hewins St., Dorchester, Mass. 

Eubank, Champ R., Pvt., Sundryes, Virginia. 

Eubank, George E., Pvt., Sundryes, Virginia. 

Fay, Alfred C, Pvt. 

Ferguson, John K., Pvt. 

Fifield, Earl, Pvt. 

Florey, Charles E., Pvt., R. F. D. No. 4, Coldwater, Mich. 

Fralich, Palmer B., Pvt. 

Grape, Erick W., Pvt., Estelline, S. D. 

Granit, Michael, Pvt. 

Hann, Orion A., Pvt., Sharon, Pa-, Box 113. 

Hanson, Charles, Corp., Rivertown Route, Deerwood, Minn. 

Hathaway, Roy C, Pvt. 
^Hickman, Roy, Pvt. 

Hines, James M., Pvt., 57 Easton Ave., Worcester, Mass. 

Holland, Joseph, Pvt., Monticello. 
■""Houston, John M., Pvt. 

Huffman, Willie, Pvt., Bridgewater, Virginia. 

Hughes, Mack L., Pvt- 

Hyronimus, Rheinhold, Pvt., Toledo, Ohio. 



COMPANY "I" ROSTER 197 

Johnson, Evan, Pvt. 

Knighten, John C, Pvt. 

Larson, Albert, Pvt. 
tLarson, John W., Pvt. 
* Leonard, Herwitt, Pvt. 

Lesikar, Emil, Pvt., Route 3, Temple, Texas. 

Lewis, Thomas J., Pvt. 

Liebman, William, Pvt., 733 West Washington St., Madison, 
Wisconsin. 

Loose, Robert B., Pvt. 

Macie, Frank, Pvt. 

Martin, Luther W., Pvt. 
*Martorella, Guy, Pvt. 

McDonald, Frank E., Pvt., Winnebago, Indiana. 

McWhorter, Jesse J., Pvt. 

Meleske, Anton W., Pvt., 340 Mitchel St., Milwaukee, Wis. 

Miller, C., Pvt., Eldarof Stanton, Virginia. 

Millar, Iveaux, Sgt., 163 Second Ave., Appleton, Wis. 

Miller, Harvey, Pvt. 

Miller, Joseph E., Pvt., Dannrayer Ave., South Bend, Ind. 
*Mitman, Stanley E., Pvt. 

Morgan, Louis R., Pvt., Farrwell, Michigan. 

Moravec, Frank, Pvt., Jirice, 31 Humpolea, Bohemia. 

Muiler, Arthur, Pvt. 

Murray, Ernest L., Sad., Elliston, Montana. 

Neal, Clarence P., Pvt. 

Nelson, Irvin Pvt., 4706 Troy St., Chicago, 111. 

Nielsen, Jens C, Pvt. 2517 North Springfield Ave., Chicago, 
Illinois. 
tOlder, Delbert F., Pvt., 109 Nelson St., Battle Creek, Mich. 

O'Neal, John E., Pvt. 
*Pattison, Robert C, Sgt., Esterly St., Carlisle, England. 

Painter, Thomas W., Sgt., Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin. 



198 COMPANY "I" ROSTER 

Pepper, Thomas E., Corp., Englewood, Florida. 
Perlestein, Albert, Pvt. 
*Plis, Samuel, Pvt. 
Polkinghorn, Wright W., Pvt. 

Personette, Charles, 209 N. Green St., Baltimore, Md, 
Radtke, Louis A., Pvt., Peshtigo Marinette, Wisconsin. 
Reich, Reinholt F., Pvt. 
Rice, Guy L., Pvt., Gleason, Wis. 
Rosenfeld, Samuel, Pvt., 51 Willett St., New York City, 

N. Y. 
Scharf, Hyman, Pvt., 1459 Minford Place, New York City, 

N. Y. 
Schlaupitz, Ben A., Pvt., Armenia Juneau, Wisconsin. 
Schneider, John J., Pvt., 44 Dominick St., New York City, 

N. Y. 
Seegar, Alfred W., Pvt. 

Schultz, August £., Pvt., Sparata, Wisconsin. 
Sheahan, Edward, Pvt., A1109 South Hamilton Ave., 

Chicago, Illinois. 
Silvaro, Vallititti, Pvt. 
*Silvey, Bryant D., Pvt. 
Sinicke, John J., Pvt., 365 11th Ave., Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 
Sloane, George E., Pvt. 
* Smith, Harvey, Corp. 
Smith, Hyman, Pvt. 
Smithers, Clifford, Pvt. 
Snyder, Walter R., Pvt. 
Stanes, William, Pvt., Blaza, Greece. 
Standiford, Ralph, Pvt., Bryant, Wisconsin. 
Steiger, Charles, Pvt. 

Stein, Philip, Pvt., 313 S. 5th St., Brooklyn, N. Y. 
Sterner, Edw. C, Pvt., New German, Martindale, Minn. 
Tallant, Ben M., Pvt., Gumming, Georgia. 



COMPANY "I" ROSTER 199 

Taylor, Robert, Pvt., Cooper, S. D. 

Thomas, Avila, Pvt. 

Thompson, Clarence, Pvt., Holem, Wisconsin. 

Thurloff, Frank C, Pvt., North Prairie, Wisconsin. 

Traeder, Adolph, Pvt. 

Tryggestad, Ray E., Pvt., Genoa, Wisconsin. 

Tua, Angeluis J., Pvt., 726 Demoth St., West Hoboken, N. J. 

Vegotsky, Abraham, Pvt. 

Walgreen, Martin, Pvt., Athelstane Marinete, Wisconsin. 
*Walsh, George, Pvt. 

Ward, Francis B., Pvt. 

Weaver, Wesley, Corp., F. R. F. D., No. 2, McKean, Pa. 

Weber, Edward, Pvt., 309 Vernon Place, Mt. Vernon, N. J. 

Weisjahn, Emil G-, Pvt., West Field, Wisconsin. 

Wignot, Ernest C, Pvt., Glenwood St., Natice, Mass. 
tWilliams, Matson, Pvt. 
fWoytisek, Frank, Pvt. 

Wyat, Lyle, Corp., E623 Logan St., Helena, Montana. 

Yagle, Joseph A., Pvt., 407 E. 153d St., New York, N. Y. 

Yarborough, Felix N., Pvt., R. F. D. No. 1, Aragon, Georgia. 

Zechmeister, Anton, Pvt., 339 23d Ave., Milwaukee, Wis. 

Zimmer, Arthur, Pvt., 1111 29th St., Milwaukee, Wis. 

Zimmer, Joseph. Pvt., 2025 Madison Ave., New York City. 

Zingsheim, Paul A., Pvt., Allentown, Wisconsin. 



COMPANY A ROSTER 
The roster of Company A follows: 

Capt. Charles G. Miller, aged 43 years, 323 McKnight Street, 
city detective. 

First Lieut. Harry E. Wootten, aged 29 years, shoemaker, 
1047 Church Street. 

First Lieut. Irvin E. Seaman, aged 43 years, sporting goods 
distributor, 219A North Fourth Street. 

Second Lieut. William A. Kauffman, aged 34 years, cutter, 
1436 Perkiomen Avenue. 

Second Lieut. James M. Snyder, aged 36 years, salesman, 
436 North Twelfth Street. 

First Sergt. Merrill E. Goldman, aged 29 years, clerk, 415 
Woodward Street. 

Supply Sergt. Joseph D. Eisenbrown, aged 23 years, book- 
keeper, 300 North Sixth Street. 

Mess Sergt. Walter Shultz, aged 44 years, molder, 314 Kline 
Street, West Reading. 

Sergt. Earl L. Shilling, aged 22 years, florist, Shillington. 

Sergt. George L Strawbridge, aged 24 years, newspaper re- 
porter, 344 South Fifth Street. 

Sergt. Harold Miller, aged 22 years, chauffeur, 548 North 
Eighth Street. 

Sergt. William B. Moore, aged 27 years, planing mill hand, 
1008 Cotton Street. 

Sergt. George A. Kuersten, aged 26 years, clerk, 335 Doug- 
lass Street. 

Sergt. William J. Eppinger, aged 35 years, boilermaker, 830 
Master Street. 

Corp. Irvin B. Bitler, aged 23 years, laborer, Shillington. 

Corp. Samuel E. Crammer, aged 22 years, salesman, 423 
North Second Street. 

Corp. William H. Baer, aged 24 years, mill hand, Shillington. 

Corp. Jacob Newstetter, aged 22 years, molder, 538 South 
Sixth Street. 



202 COMPANY "A" ROSTER 

Corp. Paul M. Johnson, aged 21 years, machinist, 930 But- 

tonwood Street. 
Corp. Walter B. Ravel, aged 24 years, inspector, 1257 

Eckert Avenue. 
Corp. Clarence L. Kercher, aged 20 years, painter, 1108 

Douglass Street. 
Corp. Samuel H. Nelms, aged 25 years, electrician, 442 

Pearl Street. 
Corp. John F. Haggerty, aged 21 years, laborer, 536 North 

Eleventh Street. 

Corp. Lehman Bright, aged 23 years, laborer, 122 Oak 
Street. 

Cook George E. Franke, aged 37 years, hatter. Tenth and 
Walnut Streets. 

Cook Thomas Scott, aged 41 years, steam fitter, Allentown. 

Mechanic Claude B. Hain, aged 22 years, machinist, 1017 
Douglass Street. 

Bugler Charles A. Hawk, aged 19 years, electrician, 432 
North Thirteenth Street. 

Bugler John J. Shucker, aged 19 years, student, 131 Orange 
Street. 

Private Floyd Adam, Brst-class, aged 23 years, machinist, 
214 Hudson Street. 

Private Norman C. Bear, first-class, aged 22 years, ma- 
chinist, 935 Windsor Street. 

Private Emanuel C. Beck, first-class, aged 25 years, fore- 
man, 1020 North Fourth Street. 

Private Edward J. Boone, first-class, aged 22 years, clerk, 
8 North Second Street. 

Private Earl Bush, first-class, aged 20 years, laborer, 742 
North Ninth Street. 

Private Duval Carbaugh, first-class, aged 26 years, laborer, 
106 NicoUs Street. 

Private Harry C. DeLong, first-class, aged 20 years, baker, 
550 Pike Street. 



COMPANY "A" ROSTER 203 

Private Elwood C. Ford, first-class, aged 24 years, weaver, 

Coatesville. 
Private Franklin H. Gates, first-class, aged 40 years, laborer, 

110 South Ninth Street. 
Private Frank J. Goodman, first-class, aged 20 years, iron 

worker, 512 South Fifth Street. 
Private Raymond D. Harter, first-class, aged 19 years, 

laborer, 1218 Green Street. 
Private Thomas S. Marsh, first-class, aged 44 years, gardener, 

1311 Buttonwood Street. 
Private Harry D. McCarty, first-class, aged 20 years, shoe 

worker, 715 Locust Street. 
Private Elmer J. Mengel, first-class, aged 24 years, inspector, 

244 Franklin Street. 
Private William A. Mitchell, first-class, aged 21 years, 

laborer, 100 Yarnell Street, West Reading. 
Private Walter C. Morgan, first-class, aged 19 years, heater, 

1339 North Ninth Street. 
Private Arthur M. Sowrey, first-class, aged 22 years, laborer, 

418 Pine Street. 
Private Stanley R. Stitzman, first-class, aged 22 years, clerk, 

1137 Douglass Street. 
Private Raymond R. Weiser, first-class, aged 19 years, 

messenger, 422 Spruce Street. 
Private John W. Ault, aged 18 years, laborer, 1231 North 

Ninth Street. 
Private Russell C. Bernard, aged 23 years, plater, 617 Minor 

Street. 
Private Jeremiah A. Bossier, aged 24 years, finisher, 

Shillington. 
Private Charles F. Lash, aged 21 years, laborer, 320 Wood 

Street. 
Private Charles E. Mack, aged 22 years, teamster, 1336 

Buttonwood Street. 
Private Paul A. Adams, aged 18 years, knitter, 723 Locust 

Street. 



204 COMPANY "A" ROSTER 

Private John H. Baureithel, aged 24 years, bank teller, 116 

Walnut Street. 
Private Clair A. Baney, aged 20 years, hotel bellman, 1327 

Kenney Street. 
Private Earl C. Burkhart, aged 21 years, laborer, Stony 

Creek. 
Private William F. Bucher, aged 18 years, machinist, 572 

South Eleventh Street. 
Private Robert E. Bruder, aged 24 years, laborer, 1028 

Locust Street. 
Private Lewis Cacia, aged 26 years, porter, 36 North Third 

Street. 
Private John G. Conway, aged 20 years, laborer, 115 Second 

Avenue, West Reading. 
Private Harry A. Crist, aged 18 years, car repairer, 759 

North Twelfth Street. 
Private Enrico Ciotti, aged 20 years, laborer, 844 Nicolls 

Street. 
Private Wilson D. DeLong, aged 19 years, student, 325 

South Ninth Street. 
Private Reuben Dibler, aged 33 years, laborer, Oakbrook. 
Private Antonio Diguardi, aged 23 years, laborer, Millmont. 
Private Edward A. Dorrington, aged 41 years, teamster, 17 

Adams Street, Paulsboro, N. J. 
Private Walter L. Eschbach, aged 18 years, laborer, 439 

Pearl Street. 
Private Harvey H. Eshelman, aged 28 years, clerk. Scarlet 

Mills. 
Private David Edwards, aged 28 years, teamster, 904 Nicolls 

Street. 
Private Paul W. Fett, aged 25 years, driver, 35^^ North 

Ninth Street. 
Private Robert Fisher, aged 21 years, laborer, 1355 Cotton 

Street. 
Private Charles H. Gallagher, aged 19 years, laborer, 427^/^ 

Locust Street. 



COMPANY "A" ROSTER 205 

Private Charles Garrett, aged 24 years, laundryman, 347 

Cedar Street. 
Private Paul Garrett, aged 27 years, laborer, 347 Cedar 

Street. 

Private Henry A. Gehris, aged 19 years, machinist, 725 Birch 
Street. 

Private Shipton G. Grauer, aged 19 years, student, 433 
Woodward Street. 

Private John W. Grim, aged 18 years, painter, 201 North 
Tenth Street. 

Private Harry Green, aged 40 years, puddler, 2911 Sixth 

Avenue, Altoona. 
Private Harry J. Gill, aged 34 years, electrician, 4340 Free- 
land Avenue, Roxborough. 
Private Howard McK. Hartman, aged 21 years, waiter, 

Schaefferstown. 
Private Frank Hahn, aged 18 years, chauffeur, 869 North 

Eighth Street. 
Private Arthur T. Halmar, aged 18 years, machinist, 525 

South Fifteenth Street. 
Private George A. Heckler, aged 18 years, laborer, 432 Penn 

Avenue, West Reading. 
Private Philip K. Howard, aged 21 years, clerk, Mt. Penn. 
Private Arthur Hunter, aged 27 years, salesman. Savannah, 

Illinois. 
Private Walter B. Huber, aged 27 years, checker, 417 North 

Tenth Street. 
Private Harry H. Hill, aged 20 years ,laborer, 3 North 

Seventh Street. 
Private Robert O. Jepsen, aged 19 years, clerk, 322 North 

Tenth Street. 
Private Paul S. Kercher, aged 18 years, shoe cutter, 1106 

Douglass Street. 
Private Horace Kline, aged 18 years, laborer, 1212 Windsor 

Street. 



206 COMPANY "A" ROSTER 

Private Eugene Kochel, aged 32 years, laborer, 1448 Muhlen- 
berg Street. 
Private William J. Lutz, aged 20 years, clerk, Birdsboro. 
Private Calvin S. Madara, aged 22 years, laborer, 1261 

Spring Street. 
Private Charles J. Marsh, aged 18 years, messenger, 1311 

Buttonwood Street. 
Private John A. Manbeck, aged 20 years, student, Bernville. 
Private William J. McKeever, aged 22 years, inspector, 521 

Pike Street. 
Private John McMahon, aged 23 years, laborer, 435 Tulpe- 

hocken Street. 
Private Albert R. Miller, aged 23 years, laborer, 1398 

Perkiomen Avenue. 
Private Raymond L. Mitchell, aged 18 years, truck driver, 

624 Mulberry Street. 
Private Russel H. Moll, aged 20 years, student, 1018 North 

Fifth Street. 
Private James Morro, aged 29 years, molder, 712 Briggs 

Street, Harrisburg. 
Private Antonio Morro, aged 22 years, laborer, 1335 Moss 

Street. 
Private Harvey Rootmoyer, aged 18 years, usher, 417 Pear 

Street. 
Private Irvin Moyer, aged 18 years, student, 1306 Pricetown 

Road. 
Private Robert S. Myers, aged 21 years, knitter, 20 Third 

Street, Shillington. 
Private Harvey E. Noll, aged 18 years, teamster, 208 

Chestnut Street. 
Private Kenneth L. Ormsbee, aged 18 years, meat packer, 

Riverview, N. Y. 
Private Herbert E. Pence, aged 24 years, laborer, Worthing- 

ton, Pa. 
Private George E. Price, aged 18 years, student, 116 West 

Windsor Street. 



COMPANY "A" ROSTER 207 

Private John S. Rathman, aged 29 years, elevator operator, 

Seyferts Station. 
Private Charles Reber, aged 20 years, hatter, Shillington- 

Private Elmer A. Reinert, aged 21 years, electric service 
operator, 937 Pear Street. 

Private Walter F. Ritz, aged 21 years, machinist, Shillington. 

Private James W. Reifsnyder, aged 40 years, cigarmaker, 
1030 Spruce Street. 

Private Clyde Reppert, aged 22 years, baker. Palm, Mont- 
gomery County. 

Private Elmer Root, aged 21 years, silk weaver, 142 South 
Twelfth Street. 

Private Henry C. Rothenberger, aged 24 years, teamster, 421 
Wunder Street. 

Private Arthur C. Ruthkowski, aged 18 years, pipe cutter, 

755 Laurel Street. 
Private Harry W. Schaeffer, aged 20 years, laborer, 420 

Orange Street. 

Private Paul G. Schwenk, aged 21 years, iron worker, 913 

Culvert Street. 
Private Stanley S. Schweimler, aged 18 years, student, 158 

West Windsor Street. 

Private Albert F. Shade, aged 23 years, cupola tender, 442 
Wood Street. 

Private Charles J. Simmons, aged 18 years, tipper, 235 
Chestnut Street, West Reading. 

Private James C. Swarmer, aged 22 years, laborer, Birdsboro. 

Private James E. Snyder, aged 18 years, assistant baggage- 
master, 916 Douglass Street. 

Private Clinton A. Stubblebine, aged 18 years, laboror, 342 
Tulpehocken Street. 

Private Charles C. Stoudt, aged 30 years, braider, 315 Cherry 
Street. 

Private Harry E. Smith, aged 32 years, printer, Reading. 



208" COMPANY "A" ROSTER 

Private Howard J. Smith, aged 19 years, stocking boarder, 

732 Birch Street. 
Private Lester R. Spickler, aged 19 years, iron worker, 1121 

Douglass Street. 
Private Nick Taddeo, aged 24 years, fireman, Mansville, Pa. 
Private Thomas J. Tiernan, aged 37 years, structural iron 

worker, Rhawn and Crait Streets, Philadelphia. 
Private David H. Trout, aged 21 years, pipe cutter, 42Z 

Withreel Street, Oakbrook. 
Private Ammon R. Wayne, aged 18 years, laborer, 1163 

Mulberry Street. 
Private Wesley Y. Weidenhammer, aged 27 years, laborer, 

513 Robeson Street. 
Private William E. Williams, aged 18 years, operator, 350 

Tulpehocken Street. 
Private George C. Wright, aged 23 years, knitter, 1340 

Church Street. 
Private Harry Yeager, aged 22 years, laborer, 649 Tulpe- 
hocken Street. 



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